


Psychotomotor Agitation:  A Vivisection

by XIX



Category: Original Work
Genre: 19, Blood and Gore, Evisceration, Explicit Sexual Content, Gay, Gore, Guro, Homosexual, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Murder, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Rape, Schadenfreude, Serial Killers, Sexual Content, Supernatural Elements, Underage Sex, XIX, Yaoi, m/m - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2013-12-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 13:44:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 70,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XIX/pseuds/XIX
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There will be candy. Get in the car.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Psychomotor Agitation--Daniel (rough cut)

**Author's Note:**

> These are pieces of _Psychomotor Agitation: A Vivisection_ , a completed novel which is currently in second draft. 
> 
> Have some candy. No, it's perfectly safe. It wounds me that you would even be concerned about that. Don't you trust me?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our favorite serial killer was a child once, too.
> 
> Sort of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _for David, my beloved boy_

SEEK

 

The first boy I ever loved was named was Daniel. He was a year younger than me, and therefore had not yet been exposed to the horrors of kindergarten. He was strawberry blonde with sleek soft straight hair that I envied, with my unruly dark pouf. He had greengray cartoon-wide eyes in a perfect cherub face. He was nowhere near as smart as I was, but not so dumb that he was intolerable.

He lived in the house beside the big new house we got when Dad somehow managed to get a promotion. Now we had a deck in the back and a little pond with a mechanical waterfall and goldfish inside. There was a huge fenced-in backyard, with trees and a swing. It was a two-by-four scrap painted brick red, with a hole drilled at either end for two ropes that were knotted from a wide straight branch that the tree must’ve grown just for a kid like me. It swung out over a hill, so that it was easy to sit in but at the end of each arc I was dizzyingly high above the ground, almost flying. If I jumped out, I really was flying for a second or two, before I landed hard enough to hurt until I learned to bend my knees to take the shock. This was a lot more fun if you wore a cape.

Before, in the apartment we lived in for the last ugly story, Tommy was the only kid close to my age, so I didn’t have many friends. The closest had been an older kid named Matthew, maybe twelve to my four, that played doctor with me behind a thin screen of not-quite-woods by stroking me with the smooth cool plastic instruments of my Fisher-Price medical kit. After a week or so he finally dared to venture between my legs with his dirty gorgeous wide-knuckled hands, staring with soft concern down at me, quietly prefacing every delicious new liberty with “Don’t mind?” 

I owed Matthew the knowledge that if you called it doctor, you could play all kinds of sticky naked games with other kids. Thanks, Matthew, wherever you are. I hope you don’t feel guilty about that game, if you even remember it now. I loved every minute. It's one of my most precious memories. You’re one of the few things from my single-digit years that I remember with nothing but joy. 

Like most other things from then that made me happy, when the grownups found out I was “messing around” with him, they put a stop to it. I don’t think they knew how close to right they were about messing around, just that I trailed after this boy three times my age and size with something much too worshipful in my eyes. They ruled against me going outside at all, just to make sure I didn’t sneak away to see him ever again. 

For the months until we moved, when ordered “out” to play I sat on our third-floor balcony, on the permitted side of the charcoal-line Dad drew two feet from the rail. Like I was stupid enough, or “talented” enough to fall over a railing as tall as my head, or through bars that were about six inches apart. This left me with a little rectangle about a foot by four feet. That was my outside.

I could watch other kids playing on the other side of bars I wasn’t even allowed to touch. Sometimes Matthew would walk by. I’d wave, but he wouldn’t wave back, just look at up at me and grin, like we both shared a secret the grownups couldn’t take. I wished he would ask why I didn’t come outside anymore, so I could tell him it wasn’t because I didn’t like him, but he never did.

 

The first time we played a game where clothes had to move, Daniel started it. I finally got the long-begged-for permission to go the entire fucking mailbox-to-mailbox distance to his house and play in his room. 

He had these, Lego like things, not real Legos--little studded flat plastic bricks about half the size of a playing card that would notch into each other and build all manner of useless shapes. The closest visual comparison is the underside of a car floormat-lots of pegs sticking out, but these were more densely placed, longer, and more plastic than rubber. Not quite sharp, not quite dull. The oval floppy thing you can buy in the shampoo aisle to scrub your scalp is close, but still no cigar.

I have been looking for the same toy ever since but I’ve never had any luck. If you have any idea what they might’ve been, let me know. And yes, that’s exactly why I want them.

He said, “Lay on your stomach,” sweeping armloads of clutter aside to make an empty patch of carpet.

I was sitting in the middle of an explosion of toys still overwhelmed from the IDEA of having so many toys you could cover your room in them this way-I guess Tommy’s room would’ve been like that, but I was never invited to His Majesty’s apartment. I was one of those kids with cheap clothes and secondhand toys. 

Daniel didn’t seem to know he had a right to be a snotty brat. He was friendly and not at all grabby, letting me play with anything I picked up. 

He pushed at me gently, smiling, until I knelt and then stretched out, mistrustful and nervous. His warm hands fumbled at the intersection of my pants and the hem of my shirt, sending chills up my spine, making the roof of my mouth feel very strange. He dragged the cotton up over my shoulders. He took an orangepink panel of this not-a-Lego and put it on my back over my left shoulder and leaned on it, not fast, not suddenly, but slowly and hard, like a deepmuscle massage with each tiny point distributing the pressure. Then he wobbled it with his palm. Just a little hurt. Just his thighs against mine and his little-kid breathing over me, and this plastic gouging pleasure into my skin that I had never fucking imagined in all my life. And then he moved it and did it again. And again. And again.

It was delicious. No touch had ever felt as good as that before, and possibly since, though I have no right to judge that now through the blur of memory. I was boneless. Thoughtless. Limp and almost asleep and probably purring. He printed my entire back, not missing an inch, shoulder to shoulder and neck to waist. It took forever. He would lift it, stroke the dappled light-red marks with his fingertips, sometimes doing it over again as if the result dissatisfied him, otherwise putting the plastic sheet so that the little spikes just lined up beside the old mark, and press again. Wobble it again. Then he’d move it over and start over. 

I have no idea where he learned it. I don’t remember him hanging out with any kids but me. Thinking back I’m sure neither of his parents was the molester type, if such a thing has a type. Certainly they were not the source of the artistry and attention to sensual detail that their son was. Many fantasies and tastes I remember having at that age seemed to have no outside source for me, either. Maybe we both remembered pieces of past lives, as close as we were to the Veil, though on the wrong side. 

Daniel’s dad was a distant rich fat graysuited banker, and his mom was a pageboy blonde with social clubs and the perfect house and always pies to make and church events to go to, leaving us in the apathetic care of some local teenage girl who sat on their mint-green couch watching their cable and giving zero damn where we went or what we did.

He worked his way to my waist, and I was a melted groaning puddle of misfit boy. My dick was hard. Oh, it meant nothing-it never went anywhere, an itch you couldn’t scratch, but it mingled with the warm sense of being safe and yet also vulnerable. I’d been pretty sure I loved him when I first saw the gleam of his hair, but now I was certain. As soon as he let me up I was going to hold him as close as I’d only ever held toys and cover his face with kisses, if he’d let me. I could not remember ever being touched for so long with such care, could not remember another human being ever giving me such delight. I was hoping he’d take off the rest of my clothes and cover me with these dappled marks, these tiny hurts. He pulled my shirt back down, smoothed it with his hands. “Will you do it to me?”

I sat up, slowly, groggy and pleasuredazed. This hadn’t occurred to me, the idea of reciprocation. Like I said, no other kids to play with, really. We traded and I pulled up his shirt. Little rush of heat from his skin. He was pinker than I was, smaller but less bony, softer. He had those little dimples on the backs of his hands that babies have, and two bigger versions in the small of his back like dolls have. I wasn’t sure how hard to push, but he cat-arched his back up into my hands until I got the idea. Then he made little noises, just one note, not even a moan, not every time. When I found a place that resulted in that sound I pushed harder. He reached back to where I was sitting on his legs, snagged a handful of my pants, tugged just a little, turned to look up at me over his shoulder and smiled a babytoothed angel smile.

 

In our vast fenced backyard there was a great big doghouse, a triangle just steep enough to make it hard to climb to the top, with no vertical end-walls, just the pointed roof and the narrow floor. It was painted the same brick red as my swing. We didn’t have a dog, so it was my clubhouse. There were old carpet scraps on the floor, and once you were inside the wooded yard and the tiny dark door hid you completely. It was dusty and warm and private. 

The spiders in the corners were polite enough to share their space with a kid who thought they were way too spooky and cool to ever poke at them with sticks. I learned to give them bugs by flicking them very gently at the web. They’d run with busy nimble legs, reminding me of someone playing piano that I’d seen on TV. They’d grab the bug and wrap him up tight and pull him close and kiss him dead. I loved them. Even then some piece of me knew what I was.

It was plenty big enough for me and another kid.

One day I lured Daniel inside this private little space, and taught him to play doctor. 

 

My mom was a pharmacist before she quit to be a full time alcoholic bitch. Uh, homemaker. She had a narrow, softcover green book from college that I have searched their house for many times since. It had a red cross on the front, but not the same as the one they used to stand for their God business. It said FIRST AID. There were a dozen or so colorplates in the middle. 

Some were of plants that Mom said were poisonous. I looked in our yard but I never found any of them. Some were of snakes that were supposed to be poisonous too, and I had only ever seen one snake, and that one from far away while Dad killed it with a shovel and I cried. I wanted him to check if it was poisonous, but by the time I came running up with the book he’d chopped it into several candy-colored squirming little segments. “A snake is a snake,” he told me, digging a lazy shallow hole and nudging these terrible still alive pieces into it, scraping a lazy scoop or three of dirt over it. Parts of it squirmed up from under the dirt, already slowing. He chopped at them once or twice, and each blow made me scream. I crouched with hands in my hair and could not look away and cried and cried. He rolled his eyes at me, mouthing baby. Then he went inside dragging the shovel in a few lazy S-curves to wipe it off, like snake blood was dirtier than dirt. 

The real lure of the book was the last set of these shiny thick color pages. First of these was a naked man, and as you turned each page it was a picture of deeper and deeper inside the body. Second, the skin missing, which scared me, all this skein of red. I asked Dad and he said it was muscle, and that was what we were eating when we had meat, only from cows or pigs and not people. After that for some reason it didn’t scare me anymore. 

Then my favorite picture, all the things that were hidden underneath the muscle, the meat. The man with his face still Ken-doll expressionless and his arms out like he was showing off, proud of being open from neck to hips. Ta-da! Like a, flasher, ha.

Inside him were Christmas-colored shiny shapes that were like worms and like chicken livers and turkey giblets but were mostly like nothing I had a word for. I tried pressing against my own stomach to see if I really had these weird things too, but I couldn’t figure out which bumps and lumps and sloshy things I was feeling were the same as the ones I was seeing. The heart was the best one, so pretty in the picture, like a closed flower, and it was easy to find my own because I could feel the thumping under my hand, though the little cage of flat bones kept me from feeling it directly. If I pushed under the edge I could just barely feel the very edge of that movement into my fingertips.

I got in trouble for “stealing” this book a few zillion times.

I remember asking Mom why the last picture, a grinning white skeleton, didn’t have a penis bone, when the first naked picture was clearly a man, penis and all. She laughed and never answered me. My own penis was soft sometimes and hard sometimes, and I decided the bone could slide in and out like the claws of a stray cat I’d petted once.

“Maybe he’ll be a doctor.”

I got the idea, and told them that was exactly why I wanted it, and then the book was allowed to stay in my room where I could stare at the strange sculptures inside the windowed-open chest as long as I wanted. I told them I was studying, because Mom said that was what she’d used the book for. They found that very cute. 

I learned to say “A brain surgeon,” whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, because my Dad said (“Too smart for your own damn good!”) that was the smartest thing you could be. I didn’t really mean it. The top of the man’s head was missing in one of the pictures like a lid someone had lifted off, but the brain looked too simple and too familiar, the same smooth dome as packages of hamburger meat from the store. 

I had the idea a doctor was like a mechanic for people, and I didn’t want to fix anything, and certainly not the boring pink brain. 

I just wanted to see if real organs were really as mysterious, magical, colorful and tempting and soft as those pictures made them look. At the time I was reminded of the bright expensive playsets that swung open on hinges to reveal all kinds of complicated smaller playthings inside like they were secret. The things in those pictures were like the noisy or stolen toys you had to keep hidden, or some grownup would take them away, put them over your head so you couldn’t reach, couldn’t play with them anymore.  
I’d pretend I wanted to be a doctor until I got to see a real person’s insides, then quit and write stories instead. By then I’d be so big They wouldn’t be allowed to boss me around.

 

It was my doctor’s kit, and my clubhouse, and I thought of the game, so it was only fair that I got to be the doctor. Daniel giggled at this, but didn’t argue. He just took off his shirt and looked at me with all kinds of trust.

I put on the yellow-and-light-blue stethoscope, feeling very powerful and important. I moved the fire-engine red cup around until I found the loudest place on Daniel’s chest, exactly where the thumps were the strongest on my own chest, just left of center and a little higher than the baby-round jut of his stomach. My own stomach curved in and not out. Mom said that was because I kept making myself sick.

The stethoscope really worked. Listening to Daniel’s heartbeat was much, much more satisfying than listening to my own. I thought of the cherrycolored heart in the green book, tried to imagine what it looked like while it was making that low, liquid, perfect sound. I had the idea that it was hopping around in there, and that the purpose of the ribcage was to keep it from escaping and wandering all over your body. I fell into something like a trance, the drumming in either ear making it sound like it really came from inside my head.

Finally Daniel squirmed from boredom and dusted spiderwebs out of his hair. He said “Am I gonna die?” which deafened me through the earpieces and made me snatch them off so fast it got both of us laughing. It led to a brief side game of trading the stethoscope back and forth, making stupid noises into the cup to hurt each other’s ears. When we were tired of that he submitted to a toy thermometer in his mouth. 

That wasn’t where I wanted to put it (and not where I put it when I played with it alone, and come to think of it I’m pretty sure I never washed it, ha) but I didn’t want to scare him or perhaps send him running to the grownups. They were bossy and selfish about clothes coming off, and insisted that touching yourself--and presumably anyone else-on your “privates” was nasty. 

If they were private, why was it any of Their business what I did with them?

I knew better. They didn’t want me to touch my between my legs because it felt wonderful, the same reason they seemed to have most of their rules. They didn’t want me to have ways to feel good all by myself that they didn’t control, because promising or forbidding fun things was how they made me do whatever they wanted. I’m still pretty sure that’s the reason the self-proclaimed grownups of the world are so anti-masturbation.

This idea had all kinds of nifty applications. 

I knew if they knew I wanted that green book because the pictures made me feel good inside my head and inside my stomach and between my legs, they’d take it away. So I told them the doctor lie. It made me feel a different kind of good to hear them beam at each other about it, because I’d finally tricked them, for once. Now I understood why Mom smirked when she got her way by tricking me. 

I took the thermometer out of Daniel’s mouth, spun the little yellow knob at the end so the red and white middle made candycane swirls. I told him he was very sick and needed a shot. He pretended to protest and whined that he didn’t want a shot and he didn’t feel sick, but he knelt up in the cramped doghouse space, tugged his pants down to his knees without my having to suggest it. 

Oh, how I loved him. 

He laid on his stomach, watching over his shoulder the way he did for the non-Lego game while I took out the redyellowgreen toy syringe and the redyellow toy vial that had the same cross on it as the magical green book. I did quite a good job of pretending to load it. I even knew to thump the syringe a few times, though I didn’t understand why. He did big-eyes like he was scared, hid his face in his arms. 

I wanted to bite him, but other kids tended to run to grownups as fast as bad news if you bit them. You had to get them to do what you wanted without getting in trouble, and so far I hadn’t figured a way around the biting thing.

The only shot I could ever remember getting had been in my thigh. That had hurt worse than anything I had ever felt at the time, until a bee sting in my palm took the high score for agony. The lady doctor who gave me the shot told me it wouldn’t hurt. Because she was pretty and smiled at me and hadn’t hurt me yet and smelled nice, I believed her. After, I tried to hit her, yelling at her that she was a liar until Mom hit me. More proof that all grownups were mean, cheating jerks, as far as I was concerned. They were allowed to lie, when I got hit for lying even sometimes when I wasn’t lying. 

Still, I knew it was possible to get a shot “in your butt” because of Dad threatening me with the same when I was “making myself sick.” I also knew that scratching myself in a certain place caused Mom to scream “Don’t put your finger in your butt!” 

I connected these two ideas to figure out where, exactly, the syringe would go. 

At least, that’s where I guess I got the idea. Matthew had never tried to penetrate me with anything, and until then he was the extent of what I guess would be called my sex life. 

I had to push at Daniel’s knees so he’d spread his legs. That still didn’t work, and I had to spread him apart with my hand. He made a worried little noise, but he didn’t try to stop me. 

I was slightly grossed out, on the off-chance that the grownups were right about between your legs (and especially your butt) being nasty, but he didn’t look nasty to me. Quite the opposite. He had soft blond fuzz that started in the small of his back and wandered down between his cheeks. What little kids called nuts were even smaller on him than on me, covered in that same almost-colorless down. They looked very fragile and soft. I wanted to 

_(bite)_

touch them, but again, I was afraid I’d scare him in the wrong way. He also had the same tiny brownish pink wrinkled hole that I did when I managed to steal a hand mirror and investigate. I centered the dull green “needle” of the syringe (just a nub, not even a point) here and pushed, very gently. 

He did a lot of _ow ow ow,_ but he didn’t move. It didn’t really hurt me when I did it to myself, though I never pushed it in very far. I figured he was just playing the game with his usual talent. I stopped, just in case, and pushed the plunger down (which did nothing but thump a yellow cover over the red plastic cylinder down inside the syringe). He made one more little _ow_ at that and lay still, breathing hard. 

I took it away, waiting for him to yell or move or something. When he didn't I put one finger against the tiny hole, pressed, rubbed, the way the lady doctor rubbed the bruising knot where she’d given me the shot in the thigh. He was warm and just a little sweatsticky, and his flesh seemed to tug at my finger. I pushed until I couldn’t see my fingernail. I expected him to stop me, surely, now, but he looked back at me with those graygreen eyes, and did the same arch that meant harder when we played the non-Lego game. Made all the same happy, one-note noises.

I pushed harder. More encouraging hum from Daniel. Inside he was warm and slippery and wet. He kept doing that lean in my direction, wanting more and harder until my finger was in him all the way up to my hand. He felt exactly like I’d imagined the gleaming alien things in the picture-book would feel. Something about how soft he was and how tightly he was gripping at my finger made my stomach and head and between my legs feel the same warm tingly deliciousness the pictures gave me.

Afterwards I could smell him on my fingers for hours. I still didn’t think it was nasty, still, quite the opposite. It took a long time to sleep that night. It made little tinglepangs happen lower than my stomach every time I caught his scent.

 

We played this game almost every time he came over. Sometimes we traded, but I wanted to be the doctor and not the patient, and once he realized that he had no objection. I think he preferred it that way too. 

After I had him pretty well trained for this game, I decided to try something new. 

I did the required stethoscope-and-thermometer foreplay, thumped his knees with the mustardcolored plastic hammer, peered into his ears and eyes and mouth through the light-blue little funnel on the light-blue little handle. Then I shook my head, like it was very, very serious, probably imitating some shitty actor on one of Mom’s shitty soaps.

“You need an operation.” 

He looked a little uncertain, but he obligingly breathed in and out of a paper cup held over his face, pretended to sleep. I drew slow harmless lines up and down his naked chest from throat to pelvic bone with a butter knife that was very hard to steal. He shivered, but I didn’t really notice. It made me breathe funny, faster and faster. It made my hands shake and my mouth dry and my stomach do strange rolling loops that weren’t quite excitement and weren’t quite dread. It made me kiss his neck and his face and his hair, like I’d, explode, if I didn’t. 

When he was tired of this game and had to go home I pried the white plastic casing out of the toy doctor’s kit and hid the knife behind it. It’s probably still there. 

That one made it impossible to sleep that night, made me wish I had a real knife and not a rounded safe one, made me angry that he had something I wanted all selfishly tucked away under his skin. It made me angry that I loved every bit of him I could touch and that therefore, there were bits of him I couldn’t love. 

I never suggested that particular variation on the doctor game again. It felt too dangerous. I thought about that round butter knife and the dent it made in his skin when I pressed a little too hard, tried to imagine it opening him like a book and those pictures inside, only real. It made me too sad. It made me roll in an uncontrollable fit back and forth across my bed, burrow into the blankets, kick my feet, open my mouth into a pillow and do a silent scream of frustration, over and over until my head hurt. It made me too hungry for something that scared me. It made my dick too hard. 

 

They made good on their threat to drag me to church. It didn’t make me stop liking Michael Jackson, or Mr. Spock, or boys in general, or brown people. It just meant there was one more day in addition to the five of kindergarten that I had to get up when I was nowhere near finished sleeping, two more hours of my life a week that I had to spend doing some idiotic thing They insisted on.

I invented a new way to use that disconnection-magick that kept me from really feeling when they smacked me. I could sit very still with my face and my eyes pointed at the loud fat man at the front, but the real me would be in my head where none of their rules could stop me, where none of them could even see me. 

Later they learned to call this daydreaming, and, of course, it was against their rules, too. My theory that pleasures they couldn’t control were forbidden was proving pretty sound, so far. But I learned to keep my face expressionless, to keep a tiny corner of my mind Out Here to answer them with when they tried to catch me escaping them that way.

For now, they were plenty satisfied that my body was present and not fidgeting or sighing--another word I didn’t understand for something I wasn’t allowed to do. As long as I could stay quiet and still, my mind was my own, and the let’s-pretend games that no one else ever played just right could go on as long as I liked. The fat man rambled on about Jesus and sin while I opened Daniel like pushing curtains apart, like pulling bedclothes back, without blood or screams. I gave him shots with real needles in ludicrous sizes, dressed him like the painted boys on MTV, summoned Matthew from wherever-he-is so that we could both be doctors together with Daniel spread and red between us.

Now, I think the reason He came to me was because He could hear what I was thinking.

 

Sometimes people went out during the fat man’s speeches, either alone and embarrassed-looking, or dragging/carrying a fussing or leaking kid. Everyone would stare or pretend not to until the big doors banged open, banged closed. Sometimes the same clatter would preface someone who’d overslept or whatever coming in late, to find themselves the focus of a million offended eyes, the subject of a brief subaudible hiss of disapproving whispers.  
When He came, there was no noise at all, and no heads turned. He was just, suddenly, there. 

Like magick.

He had a long black coat that reminded me of Darth Vader, and which I immediately, deeply envied. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen on anyone, man or woman. I’d tell you what color it was, or what color it wasn’t, but I can’t. Looking straight at Him made me so dizzy I couldn’t have told you my own name. 

He stood right in the middle of the aisle-we were sitting just to His left-with His hands in His pockets. He was staring at the fat man, and something moved from Him to the preacher like a wind, and the fat man lost his place, shuffled through his papers, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blotted his face even though he wasn’t sweating. Finally he said “Let us pray,” which meant that we had to close our eyes while he prattled on in a slightly different tone of voice, begging the ceiling to make us all good and keep us from getting sick.

The magick-man turned His head, then, looked at me with eyes the same everycolor as His hair with an expression I could not name. Later I realized it was love.

He was rockstar beautiful. My jaw was hanging open, and when I realized it I closed it so hard my teeth clicked. I stole a look at my parents, since men with hair nowhere near as long as this (including most of the men on television that made me want to keep looking) made my Dad say mysterious words like hippie and queer in a tone of voice that let me know these were bad things to be. 

Mom and Dad both had their eyes closed and their heads bowed. 

The man turned his back on the preacher, rolled His eyes, overdramatically, just for me, cocked His head at a ridiculous angle and silently moved his mouth in exaggerated nonsense words, imitating the preacher’s babbling self-importance. I started to giggle, but He took one hand out of His pocket and put one finger to His perfect lips. Shhh. 

I shushed, more out of awe than because He’d told me to. His fingernails were dangerous-long, more round than flat like mine, the color of the pearl in a ring my Mom wouldn’t wear.

The preacher closed with the usual amen. Now they would notice-but no one did.

Then I realized none of them could see Him. 

Maybe He was a ghost. No, probably not--I couldn’t see through Him. He was as solid as me or Mom or Dad. I was pretty sure ghosts were like Casper, like they were drawn on a windowpane. Maybe an angel, like in the box of books Mom only got out for me at Christmas, though they wore bedsheets and tinsel and not a Vader-coat, and I was pretty sure they wouldn’t make fun of the preacher, or he would tattle on them.

The beautiful man winked at me with one luminous eye, twiddled His fingertips _goodbye._ He walked up the aisle, past me, putting His hands back into His coat. 

I waited, but there was no sound at all from the doors.  
I turned my head to see if He was sitting behind us, even though it earned me a pinch and a hiss from Mom.

He was gone.

 

In the car on the way home I asked my parents if either of them had seen the man with the long hair and the shiny black coat. They looked at each other, that grownup-look that means they’re talking nothing good about you even when they don’t say a word. 

Mom said, “You fell asleep and dreamed it.”

Dad said, “Quit making up stories.”

Since then I’ve made up quite a few stories. This is not one of them.

 

I tried and failed to draw Him all day. I wasn’t much good at drawing-then or now-and my attempts were so very far from how perfect He was I threw them all away, ashamed.

I could think of His coat, His fingernails, but I could not remember His face. 

I still can’t. He doesn’t work that way.

It wasn’t just that I couldn’t stop thinking about Him. It was more like I could feel Him, outside, or maybe inside, the way you can sometimes feel that there’s going to be a thunderstorm. 

Getting out of bed at night and sneaking around was risky, but if He was outside, I had to let Him in.

I looked out my bedroom window, but there was a big rustly bush that blocked almost everything. I tiptoed to the back door, cupped my hands against the glass and peered out. Everything was blue-violet, spooky and abandoned-looking. My swing looked lonely all by itself.

Night made everything match as though the same person had painted it all. It made the grownups go to bed so that you could have some peace for once. I was rarely allowed to go out after dark, but when I did it seemed so much easier on the eyes and the lungs and the mind. Softer, cooler, safer, more real.

I had been sure He was outside, but He wasn’t.

He was already in my room.

He was sitting on the floor with His back against my bed. 

I suppose I was expected to scream, I suppose I should’ve been afraid of a stranger, but I closed the door behind me, turning the knob first and then letting it go so the latch wouldn’t click against the frame. 

He held out His hands to me. I went to Him without hesitation, with something warm and relieved inside me as if I’d been waiting for Him to find me all my life. I let Him swallow my tiny hands in his huge inhuman ones. 

I was not at all afraid of His claws.

He smelled of chocolate and matches and the kinds of flowers that attract bees. He let me touch His yards of hair, soft as spiderwebs, crackling with energy that left my hands buzzing. I told Him it was the same color as the night outside, and that made Him smile. He put His mouth close to my ear and His breath made my tongue feel, unruly, like the red dreams sometimes did. He told me His name, and then kissed the middle of my forehead, and everything inside my mind was quiet and still.

I remember Him holding my face, saying _because you know._

Whatever He meant, it made me straighten my back. 

Other than that one phrase, I can’t remember exactly what He said to me. It isn’t because I’ve grown. He hid it so far inside me that even I couldn’t find it, so that They could never get at it, so that no one could ever take it away.

Whatever it was, I know it was the truth.

 

“The man in the black coat was in my room last night.”

All right, I don’t know why I did it. Something like the reason you say _so there_ or _I told you so._

It was breakfast. Dad lowered the wall of newspaper so he and Mom could exchange another of those infuriating, amused looks. 

I’d been put in front of the ubiquitous eggs again. For the first time it occurred to me to try to disconnect my mouth, the way I’d learned to disconnect my ass or my thighs or my mind to make their various tortures futile. Maybe He taught me. I just, decided, I would not taste them. 

And I didn’t. 

I put one slidy, slimy forkful past my teeth, waiting for the burst of nausea. It never came. I swallowed (without chewing, I admit) and the eggs went down and stayed down. I went through the rest of them as fast as I could, afraid the magick would wear off.

Dad lit a cigarette. “Uh huh.” He was dripping with that dry mockery that I didn’t know was called _sarcasm_ just yet, though I knew that the same tone of voice resulted in a smack when I used it. “So you have a new invisible friend.”

The eggs were gone. Neither of them even noticed. I’d just defeated both of them and they hadn’t even had the good manners to be pissed off about it. 

“He’s not _invisible._ Yours might be, but I can see Him just like I can see you.”

“Of course he’s invisible,” said Mom. “That’s how imaginary friends work. It’s in their contract.” 

Dad thought that was very funny. I didn’t. 

“Then maybe He isn’t imaginary.” I was eating bacon. Oops. I turned my tongue back on. Much better.

“Then where is he? Why can’t we see him?”

Sometimes, I swear, they were dense on purpose just to drive me insane so they’d have an excuse to be jerks to me. Like they needed any additional excuses. “Because He isn’t here.”

Dad: “What did I tell you about that tone of voice?” 

See? He was allowed to be “rude” and I wasn’t. 

Mom found the idea of Him not being here very funny too, for some reason. “So what’s his name, this absent friend of yours?”

I told her. I still had a knot of scar tissue under my tongue, and I still tangled words from time to time, plus if I was loud enough to be understood it got me yelled at every time for “tone of voice” violations. Try whispering a name with a Lifesaver under your tongue to get the idea. The result had them both laughing at me, Mom the loudest. “Zipper?”

It made me so mad I couldn’t keep the subservient near-whisper they insisted on. “Ziffer. Lou Ziffer.”

Explosion, sudden and utterly without rhyme or reason as far as I was concerned. “Young man, that is _not at all funny!_ “ Dad swatted at me with a crackling handful of newspaper. It was too unfolded to hurt, though it was quite good at upsetting my milk glass into my empty plate. To Mom he yelled, “I told you, he needed church!”

Mom: “That’s probably where he picked it up-“

Me: “I _told_ you, that’s where I met Him. Maybe He followed me home-“

Dad, weighing in with his solution to anything and everything. “Go to your room!”

Clearly he meant me and not Mom. She never had to go her room, no matter what tone of voice she used.

 

I was only in there a few minutes, sitting where Ziffer had and sniffing my bedcover where He’d leaned against it. I could still smell Him. Dad did his usual mean sharp rapid-fire knock, opened the door and came in. I had to knock on their closed door and wait for an answer, which was often an order not to knock again. They’d just open mine before I even had a chance to say a word. I wondered for the millionth time why they even bothered to knock. 

“Your Mom says you probably have no idea why you’re in here.”

Usually I’d have gone with _no sir_ to avoid making the situation any worse, but I didn’t care today. “You asked me His name, and then you got mad when I told you.” 

He sat on the edge of my bed. It sent something dark and furious through me for him to touch where Ziffer had. I didn’t want his Dad-stink to cover that wonderful scent of Other. 

“I know you just picked up that name in church.” Cute. They always come up with whatever they want to believe and insist it’s the truth.

“No, sir. He didn’t say anything to me when I saw Him in church-“

_“Erik!”_

He was red-faced. It was time to go with short, short answers. When kids at school did that to smaller kids, it was called bullying and it got you in trouble. When _they_ used their bigness to threaten you it was OK. They were selfish about their power. 

I shut up, but apparently I couldn’t keep the anger off my face.

“And don’t you dare get mad at me!”

I said nothing, silently thinking that he could yell and hit all he wanted but he was _never_ going to be able to _make_ me stop being mad at him. And I knew he knew that. No matter how crazy it made them, my mind was _my own._ They knew all kinds of things while insisting everyone pretend the opposite.

“I told you about making up lies. You’re not dumb, so quit acting like it.”

That was just too much. “ _I’m_ acting dumb? If you can’t see Him how do you know what He did or didn’t say?”

Smack, half-face and half-shoulder. It wasn’t very well executed and didn’t hurt much, but it left me blushing and teary from sheer frustration.

“That’s enough backtalk!”

When grownups did it, it was called a conversation or an argument. When I did it, it was backtalk and summarily forbidden. Do you remember this shit? I’m amazed you haven’t grown up to be just like me, amazed the streets aren’t overflowing with kids like me in a pissed off, fed-up army. Come to think of it, maybe that’s pretty close to the truth. And the grownups act mystified about it.

“Lou Ziffer is one of the names for the Devil. And that is not cute and it is not funny.”

Quiet from me. I vaguely knew about the Devil, too, though until Ziffer I’d figured he was as imaginary as the other guy, like the kids that got in cars with strangers and never came back. Just a backup lie to control you, scare you.

“Now you can have all the imaginary friends you want-“

How generous of you.

“--that’s a phase all kids have-but I don’t want to hear that name again. Do you understand me? “

I nodded, hoping it would make him shut up and go away. I knew phase too-it was what they called anything they were tired of you doing, to belittle it. So Ziffer is imaginary, while God is just invisible yet calling him imaginary gets me a smack. Ziffer is visible, and telling you so or telling you His name also gets me smacked. How clear it is. No idea why I wasn’t getting it before. Thank you, Dad, for this gem of enlightening fucking parenting.

“Do you understand what it means to go to Hell?”

I nodded again to keep him from explaining it to me. A great big version of _wait till your father gets home._ I tried to think of Ziffer hitting me, found it impossible to imagine. Why would Ziffer want to punish me for _not_ doing what God said if he didn’t like God? Wouldn’t that make Him _happy_ with me? 

I was pretty sure asking Dad about this would just lead to more trouble.

I _yes sirred_ until he finally went away. Then I buried my face in the blanket where He’d touched it again, smelled Him until He filled my lungs and my head and my fury was still.

The Devil. That explained His magick and His fingernails. And it certainly explained why they were so anti-Devil. He was beautiful and smart and nice to me, and He didn’t seem to like grownups and Their rules any more than I did.

I couldn’t wait to see Him again, but as far as I remember that didn't happen for many years.  
Though sometimes, there were dreams...

 

Dad came home from work that night doing the twinkly-eyed friendly thing at me, crackling a paper bag in his hand. I was immediately mistrustful. I suspected something I really wanted as a bribe, and I suspected the condition would be _if you stop this Ziffer thing._ I was wrong, but close. 

“I have a present for you, Erik.”

It was a book, which made hopeful, but it was a fat shinycovered blue children’s Bible with insultingly large print and pictures on every page. My dentist's office had the same book. So did yours, probably.

“This is so you can learn about the Devil and you’ll know why it isn’t funny to pretend about Him.”

Well, now I was interested. I said thank you and sir and dutifully paged through it, noticing as usual that for some reason while grownups could draw women pretty they invariably made the men thick and hairy and bulgy and awful. Maybe they had special books for girls drawn the other way around to like, convince you. 

Dad beamed at me like a king who’d just handed out a knighthood or something and then forgot about me, settling into his chair with bourbon-and-coke to watch television. 

I fled to my room with this book. 

It didn’t tell me much of anything useful. God had Adam and Eve imprisoned in this garden, and he treated them exactly the way grownups treated me-bossed them around, made up stupid rules. He told them if they ate from his apple tree they’d die. I suspected he just wanted to keep them all for himself. Mom and Dad did the same thing with steak. They gave me a piece of the bigger half along the T-shaped bone, and told me that I didn’t like the other half, though I’d never tasted it. I knew it was because the smaller half was softer and better. I could tell by the way they hardly had to cut it. Boy, grownups have had just the few tricks since the beginning of time. 

A snake told Eve the truth-that she wouldn’t die at all, but that it was magick fruit and if she ate some she’d become smart. Right about then I was thinking that I already knew this story, mixing it up in my head with Snow White. 

Eve ate the apple. She didn’t die. She got smarter, just like the snake had promised. She gave Adam an apple too. I guess otherwise he’d have been a pain in her neck, now that she was smart and he wasn’t. Good on her, because playing with the dumber kids was the complete opposite of fun.

God got really mad, and said that he was gonna let them live forever, but now he changed his mind. 

That made me laugh. 

_I was gonna give you a surprise, but now I’m not._

So that’s where Mom got this trick. 

There never really was a surprise, and they were in no danger of sudden death. God just wanted them to stay dumb so he could boss them around. 

I read the rest of the book with increasing disappointment. It was a commercial for doing what God said, and of course, God said to always do what your _parents_ said. It was as obvious as the nauseating kid’s shows that tried to convince you to share or be polite or eat your vegetables. I didn’t know the word _propaganda_ yet, but I understood the concept perfectly.

The book ended somewhere after the Noah story. That one did nothing to improve my opinion of God. I knew about rainbows from a science book Dad had gotten me at a garage sale, and I was pretty sure the refraction of light had worked the same before God decided to take credit for it. 

I paged through it again, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, but I found no mention of Ziffer, and certainly no pictures that looked anything like Him. All the men had great big ugly moustaches and beards, and Ziffer’s face was as smooth as mine-I could remember that much. The men in this book looked mostly like Dad would in a few years, if he decided to wear a bathrobe and carry a stick all the time. 

I was hoping that book would tell me how to make Him come back.

 

When Dad asked a few days later how I liked the book, I told him God acted an awful lot like he did. He looked pleased, and said yes, that God was everybody’s father. He didn’t seem to grasp that I was insulting both him and God. I told him maybe I needed the sequels, because I didn’t see Ziffer or any other Devil anywhere in the book. Dad looked considerably less pleased. He said the _snake_ was Ziffer, and that because of His lies human beings died, when they would’ve lived forever. 

“But they didn’t die. They got smarter, just like the snake said they would.”

Immediate red-facedness. He slammed his drink down so hard it slopped over the side of his glass onto Mom’s end table. He said “They did too die! That’s why they’re not here now!” 

If I ever tried acting like that it was called pitching a fit, but he was allowed. It was right there in the book that _he_ gave me, that they ate the damn apple and then _knew everything._ I tried to show him, and I got smacked for backtalk. Again. “Don’t you try to tell _me_ about the Bible! God said they would die and they DIED.”

“They were gonna die _anyway._ God _lied_ so they’d feel bad because he was mad he didn’t get his way!" 

He stared at me with his mouth and his eyes VERY open. I thought perhaps he was stricken by a revelation of how true this was, but I was too mad to stop and investigate. "How come people are supposed to share toys but God isn't supposed to share his apples? Can't he just create more apples if they run out?" 

I wanted to point out that I couldn't create a new toy when some kid down the street broke mine, and I STILL had to share, but he thundered over me before I could get a new breath.

All together now. Dad’s favorite line. “Go to your room!” 

Meaning, as it always did, that I was right and they were the ones making up stories. 

 

I snuck Mom’s HOLY BIBLE out of her bookcase, thinking maybe the grownup version was different, and still hoping for, a spell, I guess, to bring Ziffer back. Grownups were sometimes so specific in what they did not want you to do that it was like they’d handed you an instruction manual. I was hoping this was one of those times.

I puzzled through the weird language and squinted at the tiny words. Same story. Still just the snake, except they called it a serpent, and I liked that word much better. It sounded much more like a liquid ribbon of muscle and tongue. It sounded like His shiny black coat felt under my hands.

Still no mention of Ziffer. Eve ate the apple, got smarter, God lied, nobody died. 

I was positive I’d seen both Mom and Dad eat apples at least once, and we had apple pie every Thanksgiving. 

I wondered how in the world they were both still so dumb. And both quite alive and kicking.

 

Now I knew why Dad had killed that snake, even though he said it wasn’t poisonous. It made me hate them just a little more. It was like them hitting me when I was telling the truth, only much worse. It hadn’t even been trying to tell him anything. It just wanted to get away from the lawn mower. 

I went into the back of the yard and did my best guess as to where he’d buried it. I stole a perfect flower from Mom’s azalea bush and put it over the grave. I hoped Ziffer could see me. I wanted Him to know whose side I was on.

SLIDE

Daniel didn’t go running to any grownups about any of our games. He’d learned, in fact, to make his eyes too round and his mouth too sad and _tell_ me he felt really sick so I’d drag out the doctor’s kit. Not that I minded. Pretty much the opposite.

The very few times Mom walked out to the doghouse instead of just shouting orders out the back door we had plenty of warning to get dressed and look innocent, because there was a permanent layer of crackly dead leaves from my swing all the way to the back fence. On rare occasions when rain destroyed my security system, we didn't play doctor.

I was pretty sure she suspected something because of the mean-eyes looks she’d give me, but she’d either order me to come in for lunch or just say that was enough playing for today and Daniel had to go home. Sometimes she’d order us to get out because of the spiders, though I knew it was because we were flushed and grinning and she didn’t want us having that much fun even without knowing what exactly we were doing. Without being able to control exactly what we were doing.

One of those times, after she’d gone back inside, I got the bright idea to climb to the top of the doghouse roof and slide down. I’d done it before by myself; it wasn’t much fun because it wasn’t at all smooth and it didn’t give you the same velocity as a metal slide on a playground, but we were tired of the swing. 

So I slid down, if you could call that utter lack of speed a slide. Daniel had to take my hand to climb up. Then he slid down.

And started to scream.

I had no idea what was wrong with him. I thought from the hysterical pitch that a bee had stung him. I tried to get him to tell me but he ran towards his house, still screaming, leaving me alone and dumbfounded. It didn’t occur to me that I was wearing jeans, and he was wearing shorts, and the roof of the doghouse was bristling with splinters. 

 

Mom was as mystified as I was. She sent me over to see if he was all right. I had never gone to the front door before, but I rang the bell and stood, fidgeting, with the sinking feeling that I was going to be blamed for it, whatever had happened. I was right. I could hear muffled crying inside, and that worried me. 

“Just a minute!” Hostile, nothing like the polished politeness I associated with Daniel’s mother. She opened the door, glaring over my head before she looked down at me. “Oh, it’s _you._ ”

That was all she said. She turned her back on me and left the door hanging open. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to follow her, or what. Finally I did. 

Daniel was lying on the kitchen table in a circle of lamps that didn’t belong there, on his stomach with his pants down and a small array of shiny things beside him. I thought they were playing doctor for a minute. I was pretty close to correct, except I guess this wasn't playing. 

His mother sat down again, which increased his crying. He was dappled from nearly his waist to mid-thigh with tiny dark marks and little streaks of blood. He gave me one teary look and hid his face, embarrassed. She tilted a magnifying glass that’s mounted on a gooseneck, picked up a sewing needle and tweezers, did something to his left thigh that made him wail so long he ran out of breath. She didn’t look at me, only said “Well, I hope you’re happy.”

She sounded like she hated me. 

I understood, now, what had happened, and I whispered, “I didn’t know, I’m sorry, I didn’t think-“

“No. You didn’t think. And _you_ -“ She jabbed hard at Daniel so that he shrieked and tried to squirm away. She dragged him back by one ankle. “Maybe _you’ll_ think next time before you let Erik talk you into something as stupid as this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. 

I said it to Daniel and not to her, but she sniffed and said. “You should be.”

I watched for a minute longer. His mom would scratch at each splinter, not being all that careful, until she could get hold of it with tweezers. Mom had done the same thing to me once when I got one in the top of my toe, and I’d had to go very, very far inside my mind to keep from screaming. Apparently Daniel didn’t know that trick; he screamed until his voice sounded like mine had last winter when I’d had a terrible cough. Finally I mumbled a bye to him, let myself out.

I stayed on the porch for as long as I dared, listening. The screams were lovely. Magickal. All my fault, and somehow more delicious for that. I felt bad that Daniel was hurt, but it wouldn't help him any for me _not_ to enjoy the screams, would it? 

I replayed them in my head for days. They made me feel scared and sick and …joyful. There was something in it like the sensation I got in my stomach when I flew out of the swing. I hoped he forgave me before his marks went away, if he ever forgave me at all.

That probably would’ve been the last straw, if his mother hadn’t been too busy to really care. I thought she was mad because she had to spend hours removing Hell knows how many splinters, instead of watching television or whatever it was that she did. Now I guess it scared her or worried her, or something, but I still think of how she looked down her nose at me and suspect my first theory was the correct one.

I wished I’d offered to do it myself. I thought of wringing that kind of scream out of him, of having real shiny pointy sharp things against his skin, and it made me positively crazy. It must have taken hours and hours. Hours of that. All for me, wasted on Daniel's nasty vacant mother who had seen it as a chore.

The green book’s pictures had made it all seem so, tame. So quiet and orderly. 

I knew I liked to hear the kids at school scream when a teacher paddled them. I was scrupulous about not getting into trouble myself. The other kids predictably hated me, and framed me once for…who cares what. When the cunt of a teacher told me she was going to paddle me I told her if she did, I was going to hit her back until I killed her. She told me to sit down, and she pretty much left me alone after that. Now, that’d have been reported to a shrink or something, but back then I guess she had no idea what to do about it, so she did nothing. Lucky her, because I was serious. 

I’d never thought of the open, red pictures, and the screams together. I’d never imagined those two, delights, overlapped.

Now, I could think of nothing else. I wished I’d stayed to watch. 

I wished it had never happened to begin with, because I was sure Daniel would want nothing to do with me ever again.

 

Daniel tapped on our back door a few days later and asked Mom if I could come outside, just like always. Once she set me free and we were alone I hugged him hard, something I’d never done before, and said I was sorry over and over. 

I wasn’t exactly, sorry, now that I knew he still liked me. I was glad he was all right, and I was glad I wasn’t in trouble. Part of me wondered if I could get him to do it again.

He shrugged, still looking a little embarrassed. He couldn’t swing, he said, but did I want to play trucks?

 

I suppose it was inevitable that we’d be caught.

Dad, with his usual logic, instead of sanding down the roof or forbidding us to slide down it anymore tore the doghouse down. Spiders, now homeless, fleeing through the dead leaves while I watched mournfully until I was made to help drag scraps of carpet and wood to the curb. Now there was a dead rectangle on the ground like a grave where I’d first loved as much of a boy as I could touch. This left us with no trysting-place. Fucking grownups.

Daniel’s parents had two yippy poodle-dogs and a plastic-tent over what used to be a porch where they lived. It connected to the house through a glass wall. I suppose we chose that because it was still a doghouse, in a way. 

I have no idea why we didn’t realize anyone could see us from the living room. Probably because it was the babysitter who was there till sunset most days, and she was forbidden to use the living room in favor of the less-expensive den. Daniel’s mother was home and we didn’t know it; the phone rang in the living room, and she walked in, picked it up, and saw us in a very fucking compromising position, clear as day in the sun-room through the glass wall. We weren’t ten feet from her. And we’d long since quit bothering with the doctor’s kit every time, so there was no possibility of fudging the truth with excuses about studying or being a surgeon.

I was ordered home. Daniel’s mom was in tears, which scared me plenty, since I knew Moms used that to make Dads start swinging. I went home and went straight to my room and waited for what I figured would be the worst beating of my life.

What pisses me off about all this, now, is that I’m pretty sure sex-games are normal between kids, gay or straight or whatever. It’s the stuff with the knife that should’ve been the real problem. Grownups. 

She called my parents and told them I was forbidden to see, talk to, visit, or I guess even think about her precious boy, ever again. She didn’t tell them why. They nagged at me every minute of every fucking day for what was probably a week or more, begging me to explain it. As amusing as that should’ve been it really wasn’t. I couldn’t think of a lie that would shut them up, and I didn’t want them to have this, too, when they seemed determined to have and control _everything_ about me, inside my head and out in the world.

Finally I was so sick of it I told them. I knew, somehow, not to mention anything about surgery or screams, but otherwise I told them pretty much everything. I was hoping it would, hurt them, somehow. They always got their way, anyway, and I was too tired of it and too, griefstricken and lonely to fight them anymore.

I didn’t get in what I’d call trouble. I think they were too flabbergasted to even know where to begin, like that teacher was. I was forbidden to ever ever ever play any game like that again. I shrugged at this. I’d been forbidden to play any game like that to begin with, unspoken or not, and I had decided that it wouldn’t stop me any more than it ever had next time I got another chance. 

Sometimes I would see Daniel in his backyard, playing lonely little games and staring wistfully towards the fence between our houses. I’d sit on the back deck as close to his house as possible, but his fucking mother must’ve had a periscope or something, because she’d scream for him to come inside _right now_ as soon as I’d gotten comfortable. As if I might get him dirty by squinting at him through the honeysuckle.

What I’d done to him had always made him smile. He’d never cringed away from my hands. Every second I’d spent subjecting him to my evil he’d looked secretly delighted. Now he looked empty and desolate, now that he was safe from me. 

Right about then Dad handed down from on high that we were moving. He said it was because the house was no good, but he was home suddenly an awful lot, and I’d seen him looking through the part of the newspaper that had tiny little words in tiny little boxes. I’m guessing someone at work had noticed the reek of alcohol I noticed most mornings at breakfast and suggested that he not let the door hit him in his drunk ass on the way out.

Daniel came to the fence while men were loading all of our stuff into a great big truck backed into the driveway. He whispered “Erik, Erik!” until I saw him. It was easy enough in the chaos to sneak over to see him. “I don’t want you to go.”

“I don’t want to go.” I didn’t. The new house had a backyard, but it was all walled in, with no trees. And no Daniel. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble.” Again.

He shrugged. There was too much green between us, but I could see one oceancolored eye through the diamonds of the wire fence. “Mom said it was nasty. And she said you were crazy.” 

“Did you-“ I couldn’t finish it. I had no idea what I was asking.

“No, I don’t believe her.” He put his mouth into one of the diamonds, and I kissed him with leaves in my eyes. Behind him, his mother screamed for me to get away from him. She got her wish.

 

Before we left that city for good, a few years later, we were in the neighborhood and my parents drove by so they could snipe at how the new owners had fixed up the house and made the yard all kinds of beautiful. Daniel was in his driveway with a skateboard. He was taller, his baby roundness gone, his hair longer and darker. He was exquisite. 

I waved. He squinted at me, for a minute, with the first sad ghost of standard male hostility towards any stranger. Then he recognized me, and his face lit up like Christmas. 

Observe the _damage_ I apparently inflicted on him. 

He waved with all of his darling little might. I waved back with a furious hunger from teeth to stomach to dick. Damn them. Dad lost his job and the nice beautiful house, but he could get a new job, a new house. I’d yet to find a new Daniel and at the time I didn’t think I ever would.

My Dad noticed. He immediately lost all interest in making fun of the landscaping. He drove away as fast as possible. 

I waved, stared, ached. I didn't cry. I knew better than that, now. 

Dad turned the corner with a squeal of tires.


	2. Psychomotor Agitation--Noise (rough cut)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our favorite serial killer finds being a teenager a grotesque and frustrating experience. 
> 
> Well, mostly. The sticky bits are not so bad. 
> 
> No one dies yet.

**NOISE**

You're fifteen, sixteen, whatever, and you're forced to get up while it's still dark every fucking morning and get herded into a bus with forty other kids, all of whom hate you, and ride to a highschool with two thousand other kids, all of whom hate you. Your parents tell you what to wear, what to eat, when to sleep, what you're supposed to do with your life, what you're supposed to THINK like even the space inside your skull is their property because they couldn't fucking figure out how to use a condom or get an abortion. And whatever your parents don't fucking control, the teachers do. 

Everything they hand you and everything they hammer you with and everything they shove down your throat spins through this filter. What comes out on the other side is like somebody stirred oil and blood and coffee grinds and vomit and piss and toxic waste together. It starts to fill up all the holes inside you, and when it's through doing that it starts to eat through the bullshit inside you that's left over from when you were a stupid little kid. It eats through happy, faith, hope, it eats through that fucking little gleam inside you that your mom put in there when she would hug you when you were little, way back before you were evil. It eats through the part of you that used to think you'd grow up to be a rock star.  It eats through the part of you that still wanted to believe that somebody could help you.

 

By the time I was fifteen I was not okay. My clearest memory from most of those days is walking around the track during gym with the three or four other lost souls that didn't hate the sight of me. Everything was, far away, and awful and dirty like looking through the wrong end of a smeared up telescope. Everything was painful--noise, light, breathing. 

At the north end of the track was the swimming pool. 

I guess now it's, October or November, pretty fucking cold, and I would look at the pool, all gorgeous and blue and clear and empty and quiet, and I would just see myself going over that fence and throwing myself in. I'd sink. All that poison they filled me with, by now there was nothing but it and my skin around it in the shape of me holding it together, it would drag me straight to the bottom. It would be so cold, and so blue, and so quiet, and so beautiful with the sunlight coming through the water, and I wouldn't. Feel. Anything. After such a little while.

Some intolerable sensation would come and go inside me, like getting hit with an electrical whip somewhere in my head. I hated everything I saw. I'm not explaining this very well. It wasn't, fuck this noise, hate. it was I WISH I HAD A HYDROGEN BOMB SO I COULD WATCH YOU POINTLESS FUCKING ANIMALS FLASHBURN INTO VAPOR AND GREASE AND ASHES IN THE SHAPE OF A SKELETON. Only, bigger. 

I would have ended the whole universe if I had a button like that. 

You know, the TV and the talk shows and the fucking suicide hotline commercials all tell you that if you're having funny thoughts that you're supposed to tell someone you trust.  I didn't trust anyone, really, but I was pretty sure drowning yourself in a pool or throwing desks at strangers or wedging razor blades into the handrails on the stairs just to watch people cut themselves were the kinds of thoughts those commercials meant. 

So I went to a teacher, there were a very few there that weren't evil, and I told her I couldn't take this anymore. I didn't tell her what it was that I couldn't take. That took more guts than anything else in my life ever has, my first kill, my first kiss, anything. I thought I would explode, or the entire school would turn around in one twilight-zone unison and point at me and yell HA HA THE FREAKY FAGGOT KID CAN'T TAKE IT. 

She said, “We'll get you to talk to the counselor, dear, and it's very mature that you said something. “

My face must’ve looked, unstable, because she added, “Are you okay right now?” and she put, her hand, on my…….shoulder……and nobody had touched me not to shove me or hit me or shake me in so…long….

I wanted to, bury my face in her chest, and cry, and cling. I wanted to beg her to let me be her kid, I wouldn't eat much, I wouldn't make noise, I’d try not to be freaky, please, please. Or just hug me for a minute. Half a minute. Ten seconds. Even if you don't mean it.

I stepped sideways away from her hand. Just a little, subtly, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. One more second and she'd have broken through the skin and all that poison would eat her, and I didn't want it to eat her. 

Not her. 

I said, I’m fine, well, let me know, and I put on my trench coat and picked up my bag that was too heavy because I had to keep in it everything I didn't want my Dad to dig through and scream about and throw away. And I went to my next class.

 

Her name was Ms. Wawh.  Rhymed with jaw. She was a lesbian, and she and Ms. Seaver, the health teacher were lovers. Once I fought a kid for making fun of “those dykes.”

All right, “fought” is not the word for it. I swung my bag over my shoulder and it intersected him at the end of the arc. It weighed about forty-five pounds, and I was not kidding with the swing. It bounced him off the corridor wall and onto the concrete floor. I stood over him and I was this close to swinging it again, this time at his head, but it was heavy and I didn't feel like going to an even more impressive prison. He kind of lay there looking confused and terrified until I picked up my bag and walked off. 

I loved her. I still love her.

 

Yeah, Ms. Wawh sent me to the counselor. Little tiny woman with short blonde hair. Her eyes were kind. She wasn't very smart. She meant well. She bitched at me about my tiny pewter skull necklace with an instrument of slow torturous death by asphyxiation around her neck in tasteful white gold. She asked me if I’d ever been molested. She asked if I'd like to go to the church where her husband was a pastor. She was completely unqualified to do anything about me, or even put a name to what was wrong with me. 

She called my Dad. He screamed at me for two hours and grounded me from the few things left I was allowed to do. I’d never tasted a single drug at the time, wasn't cutting school or getting in THAT many fights, nothing. A’s and B’s and one C in algebra and no desire to talk to two fuckers who made my life hell, and I was cut off from everything, for the crime of telling a grownup that I was homicidally depressed. When the boys in my classes were getting arrested and the girls were getting knocked up.

Two hours of Dad screaming at me, with Mom in the kitchen pretending to wash dishes acting like I wasn’t there. Two hours of _Do you want to be crazy? You're not crazy, you just want attention. Do you want to go in a hospital and be tied to a bed and beaten and raped by guards, is that what you want?_

That sounded like a lot more fun than where I was right now, but the long ago Ziffer Incident had taught me that it was pointless to argue with Dad and unwise to ever tell him what you were thinking, because if it wasn't what he was already yelling, you were bad and wrong.

_Do you want to go through the rest of your life and if you write down the wrong date everyone will remember that you're crazy and nobody will give you a job or believe anything out of your mouth? Is it worth all that just to get attention? That's all you want, is attention. That's all you want._

 

All I wanted was for someone to tell me why it felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t do something unspeakable. That was all I wanted. All I wanted was some help, and they always tell you to ASK FOR HELP, and I thought, just once, I was doing what I was supposed to do.

_It's puberty. That's all it is._

 

I'd gone through puberty at twelve. I spent it learning to apply concealer and masturbating to the idea of various rockstar boys led around on leashes or paralyzed with magickal spells. 

I was sixteen now, and I spent most of study hall wanting to shove a pencil into the eye of the girl next to me, twist and lean on it until it popped through the bone at the back of her bitchy little eye socket, because I couldn’t stand the sound of her fucking voice. Whatever the fuck that is, it is _not_ puberty.

 

He ordered me to never, ever see the school counselor again. I saw her a couple more times, maybe out of rebellion, maybe out of desperation. It was like she didn't care anymore. If she ever had. There wasn't much she could do for me, I guess. Like I said, I didn't get in fights, was passing everything, didn't do drugs, so I guess she thought she was wasting time on me when there were kids with real problems around. 

To her credit, I’d like to point out that I wasn’t being very forthcoming. How do you tell someone you want to destroy everything? How could I explain to this tiny woman who said of my skull necklace “That isn’t helping you!” that yes, it’s the _only_ thing that is helping me, the only space in which I can imagine relief from whatever it is that’s crushing me from the inside. Never mind. I tried church. It didn’t save me. Neither did you.

 

Ms. Wawh asked me if I was better. 

I told her yes, thank you. Because I loved her, and I didn't want her to worry, or feel that she had failed me. Because I wasn't her problem. Because I'd given up hope that any of them could or would do anything to help me.

Now, sometimes, I wish I’d told her no, just to see if she had a Plan B. 

Or talked to the gorgeous Psychology teacher. That one was super, super-tempting-Mr. Roberts was a beautiful, kind, vicious funny Us-teacher, but I finally decided that on the off chance that he genuinely liked me (he seemed to) I couldn’t risk losing one of the one-hand count of people that MIGHT like me. Oh, and the fact that he and Ziffer were two of the only men I’d been able to imagine fucking me and not the other way around. Trying to imagine asking him for a second after class to tell him about my evil made my heart race in a way that made me fear I’d _cry_ or something while trying to tell him, and I never attempted it. 

He nearly changed my mind the day Dahmer was killed. By the time I reached his class-third period, maybe? I was an open fucking wound behind a wall of frozen motherfucking fury. All day long I was in a sea of it, this lonely creature’s amusing rape-by-broomstick, or was it crowbar, and did they knock the brain out of his head, and if so, would he still be able to try to eat any of it? The faggot. 

_Did you hear about the pictures? Did you see that drum they had? That’s why they didn’t find him insane, cause they knew someone would kill him in prison. Damn straight. About time._

It was all anyone was talking about. Including the teachers. And they were quite pleased about it, every one of them. 

I went into the bathroom, threw up, rinsed my mouth, fixed my eyeliner. Went into Mr. Robert’s class and sat down to find him sitting down looking the way I felt. He said, “Today we’re having silence because of the murder,” and that’s all he said. His eyes were red. I wondered if he’d thrown up, too. 

I wanted to tell Mr Roberts everything in that moment. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to tell him I'd loved Dahmer, that I had quietly dreamed of writing him when I was free of my parental jailors, that I had smiled in the dark thinking that there was one person on Earth I could talk to without _having to censor a motherfucking thing._ I wanted to tell him what anguish it was, to know that was no longer true, and that my enemies were delighted by that atrocity. I wanted to tell him I was terrified I'd come to the same end. I wanted to know how Dahmer could've avoided it. I wanted to thank him for having enough love or pity to weep for this man, and for letting me know that I wasn't the only one on Earth who was grieving. I wanted to know if it upset him for the same reason it upset me, though now I am guessing it was sadness and sympathy and not…..solidarity, that made him declare it a day of mourning.

In the end I did nothing. It was taking everything I had to hold the mask on, to keep my hands in my pockets. I couldn't tell speak to him or anyone. All I could do was stare at nothing thinking of Jeff lying white and still, all alone, _ended,_ and the world applauding. The letters I'd written in my head. The feeling in my stomach, when I imagined somebody else saying, _I know exactly what you mean,_ and knowing it was true. The danglesnatch.

I didn't dare speak. Not with such a shriek in my throat waiting to escape. It was too dangerous. 

And the next day it felt like the opportunity had passed.

When I was seventeen or so managed to have sex. Sort of. Twice. 

Well, with two different boys, anyway. 

It was more than _twice._ I wasn’t that bad at it. Shut up.

Neither one would let me kiss him.

The first was a forgettable boy named Jason with colorless hair. I met him because of my desperation for something that wasn’t this and my wish to try everything They ever said I shouldn’t. I cut algebra and snuck under the bleachers where the stoners hung out. He looked the least hostile, I asked him if I could buy something, and he laughed at my newness and sold me something and taught me how to get stoned. 

 

A few weeks later we were were shoulder to shoulder passing a joint. We were as low as you could get under the bleachers, so close to being under the very first row that we were propped on our elbows and waving off cobwebs. It was almost black, under here. Nowhere near night-dark, but close enough for kids with no choice. He kind of, sat forward, stared at me intently, handed me the joint, and then flopped over on me with his face buried in my chest. I’m pretty sure I yelped until I felt his mouth moving and it confused me into stillness. Then I realized that was supposed to be a kiss, and I figured out the rest pretty quick. 

We exchanged a few successful handjobs and a few semi-successful tries at blowjobs. He wouldn’t come in my mouth, and he had the upsetting habit of yanking away from my hands instead of coming there, either. But it was fun, and disgustingly innocent, I guess, lying in Florida weeds in Florida sand, in summer shade with too many bugs and too much human noise nearby. We never had time for it to be anything but desperate and sticky and sweaty and not quite good enough. He was too stoned to be interesting and interested in nothing once he got off but being more stoned. He had beautiful cheekbones.

 

The second was a pointy auburn thing that came up to me while I was under the same bleachers and asked if I smoked. I misunderstood and handed him a Camel. Yeah, I was still pretty new. I didn’t connect his laugh and the Camel already burning in my hand with how dense I was being. 

This one cheerfully let me suck his dick. That was much, much better, in a way that made something inside me feel less, starved. It helped if I envisioned myself buried face-first in his folded open stomach. 

I became very very good at sucking dick and very good at cutting class and very good at getting him to join me so that I could spend hours with my head in his lap and my mouth around his leaking, twitching cock. Bliss. We had it down to a science. He’d put up with my weird till he’d get tired of my licking him from ribcage to waist, and would kind of eel his way up under me to move my head down. I learned to put one hand on him to kind of steer him away from my gag reflex and one hand on me to _keep from biting off a piece in frustration_ and I’d time it so he’d come in my mouth when I came in my hand. 

This was so much _closer_ than mere, skin. This, so laden with nerves, it’s very close to no skin at all. 

And ejaculation is gorgeous. 

He’d hold himself shaking-still until the first edge of orgasm and then there’d be this indescribable, elemental, warm salty throb filling my mouth, and both of his hands would slam into my head, knot in my hair. He’d push me up with one arch of spine and shove of hips and pelvic bone crammed against my face and he’d h i s s through his teeth like I’d burned him. And then this thudding thick fountain, this precious forbidden magickal substance you can’t have unless you manage the puzzle to get it, unless you tease it out with tongue and hands and eye contact and suction. Just for you, all for you, all this embarassed longing, all this unhideable message from this untouchable place. 

I probably ruined that boy for head for the rest of his boring life. Ha.

So close. Sometimes even the individual sort of spasms were together and I’d lose myself in those times, lay with my head on his hip and both hands in my mouth till he’d kind of shove me with the crescent of his hipbone and say “Dude, class.”

A few months later I lured him to my house when Mom was unconscious drunk and Dad working late and got him ridiculously high and gave him one of Mom’s Darvocet. And we watched VHS of whatever horror movies I’d managed to both tape AND rescue from Dad, and then his pants were off and he was on his face asking a pillow if I would fuck him. 

I did. Sort of. I managed finally to get my dick inside him. I’d smeared him with as much spit as my cottonmouth could manage and I was sort of spreading him open, slash, holding him down, with one hand on either cheek of his ass, and he was folded over the edge of my bed with his toes digging into the floor whimpering in what I thought was lust but what I guess was probably terror. He was dry inside, and scared and stoned and not at all ready, and it was the tightest hottest fucking _ache_ around my cock, and it was the most deliciously thou-shalt-not-thing I’d ever felt in my life. He screamed like a firebell and it made me snarl and snap and shove and _come_ like I never knew it was possible to come. 

It was exactly what I always wanted. Except not.

He didn’t come. He cried a while. I let him take a shower and stole him a bourbon and Coke. After an hour or so he stopped crying, and I gave him Visine and handed him our mouthwash, and then his mom came and picked him up.

He didn’t come to school for three days. I wonder what kind of sick he faked. Or maybe he just hid somewhere. After that he got his weed from someone else and wouldn’t really talk to me. I found this scary, until I realized he didn’t intend to tell Them on me, and then just frustrating, since he was the entire top forty on my jerk-off list, and my only viable option for trying this again. I did the hey a few times, when I’d see him pretending not to notice me huddled around someone else’s joint. He’d nod and go hey and then turn his back to me. Nice view of the shoulderblades under the black t-shirt. 

Too late, bitch. I swallowed strings of universe that were born in you. Now part of you will always be mine and you can ignore me all you like. Nothing can change it.

I can’t remember his name. Kevin? Calvin? Something. I need to get better at that.

 

Either the last or the second-to last day of high school my sophomore year I tried to go see the dumb counselor one more time. She smiled at me like somebody she recognized because they used to make her fucking cappuccino every morning or something, and asked me in this shiny voice how I was doing. 

I told her I was fine.

I went and sat in the woodshop, and I didn't even have that class, but nobody seemed to give a damn. I watched the table saw spin around until everyone left but me. The teacher told me it was past the end of class, and told me to have a nice summer. He didn’t even know he’d never seen me before.

 

I lay in bed and listened to Alice Cooper and Skinny Puppy and Deathstyle and Nine Inch Nails. 

My Dad took all my black clothes—what he could find, anyway--and all my Stephen King books, more revenge for the counselor thing and for my not being, some perfect TV kid like our neighbor's kid, something. More prison, just the guard tossing my cell every few days. Dahmer would've known exactly what that felt like.

He would've taken my trench coat, but that would've come down to a fistfight and he told me I could keep it but never wear it anywhere, probably planning to steal it out of my room. He was very close to death, then. I'd long since hidden my already packed bag in a neatly taped box marked TOYS-KEEP-FUTURE KIDS. I decided, period, that if he stole another thing from me, the next time he passed out in that chair of his I was going to slide a lit cigarette between his limp fingers, and leave.

He didn’t think of the music. I thank Hell now that music never really meant anything to him, so that he had no way of comprehending what it meant to me. He never heard the real music, and when he did he didn’t understand it except as noise. And most of the music lived in my backpack anyway, where it was safe. Where it could be with me, all the time.

At night when all of Them were asleep I would put on my walkman and coat and gloves and black boots and jeans and climb out the window and walk, just walk, with all this dark around me and nobody talking to me or wanting me to do anything, just night, just dark, just stars maybe, if you could see them through the pollution. Just walking until I had to turn around to get home in time to catch the fucking prison bus to the fucking prison school.

I worked a part-time job I hated and often did the two-hour walk to the thrift store. I slowly, slowly started to rebuild, clothes and books that I hid in my locker, like it was contraband. Everything in the world that I loved or understood, everything that didn't make me sick, and it was contraband, and it fit in a two foot by four foot locker.

Ms. Wawh seemed to make some effort to--she would smile at me and talk to me, and I would fake something back. She was the sort who would tell stories for the whole class, teaching us real things for a change, tales of helping a kid buy a car and getting another one off “really bad drugs, children, not the hippie kind.” And she made a toking gesture and winked to uproarious laughter and happiness. Nobody ever ratted on her. Everybody loved her except the bible-thumpers, and I don’t think they are capable of loving anything.

She never touched me again. By then I didn't care anymore. Maybe she just said all that because it was her job or something.

 

You wait it out. 

That's what prisoners do. Live in their heads, wait it out, learn the fine art of being a zombie. 

You learn not to care about anything, or not to let on if you do, because they'll use it against you, use it to control you. You trim down every need and connection and whatever's left. You satisfy yourself with magazines and razor blades and alcohol you steal.

You lie in your bed and listen to people that are just as mad as you are and in the same agony you are and are always only as far away as your stereo. You get a Walkman from somewhere and that's even better, now it sounds like they're inside your head, close as lovers, and they can go with you everywhere. When you wear it you can't hear everyone running their stupid fucking mouths, and nobody talks to you, and if you're getting called _faggot_ you don't have to know it. 

All you know is the voices of people that never judge you, never leave you, people that dress like you, people whose dicks you want in your throat and in your hands. People you want to cover with your come and piss, people you want to break with fists and spit and drugs and bruises, people you want to wind close in a vinyl tangle afterwards. People you want to sleep in the same bed with you afterwards, all sticky and warm and peaceful like the sky after a storm. 

You lie in your bed and write in notebooks you hide. You tell yourself it'll get better when you get a job and a car and a footlocker with a lock. You masturbate to the best songs with the door locked. you wear long sleeves to hide the cuts you made to keep yourself from exploding. You tell yourself you're an artist and that's why nobody understands you. 

You buy a guitar you’re never allowed to play loud enough for anyone to overhear. You would have a band, except that you have maybe one friend and he or she's just there by default, and can't even understand half of what comes out of your mouth anyway. You write lines and then weird poetry and then pages and pages of fury and poison. This is somewhere to put it, all right, but there's so much inside you there's not enough paper on Earth and you can't write that fast. 

Some stupid fucking teachers tell you have talent. For some reason you believe them. Maybe you want to believe them. Maybe it just startles your brain so much to hear something nice directed at _you_ that you're tricked into believing them. 

So you send stories around, carefully following the directions in a fucking library book, and you lie in the same bed still listening to the same bands and have ludicrous dreams you have no business having, about getting OUT, about getting OUT, about being somebody and doing something and mattering somehow. You're too young to understand yet that just isn't how Earth works. But you learn. Oh, you learn. 

You learn when your parents hand you stacks of rejection letters every couple of days, looking half smug and half disinterested. These are usually Xeroxed form letters, or your own query letter with a rubber stamp crooked across the top, or just everything you sent crammed back into your SASE with no letter at all. Sometimes you get a few lines of confused, horrified prattle. Sometimes they say "this isn't quite right" for whatever fucking bullshit magazine they run. Sometimes they if you’d buy a subscription you’d have a better chance next time and they're looking forward to seeing more. If you're stupid enough to take any of this as encouragement, you get to waste more agony and more typing and another stamp. 

After a little while of this you realize that you've hit the bars of the cage. 

You realize that whether you have talent or not doesn't fucking matter on this planet. All that matters here is if you have the right clothes, car, girl, face, church, parents, house, sexual orientation, religion, interests, number of zeroes at the end of your bank account. 

You hear about Dahmer, about Gacy, about Berdella (NOBODY has ever heard of him, and he was a genius). You're terrified that will happen to you, and you have this weird hot wish inside of you, and you think of thump squelch bone blood twitch fall thump. You think of how that just might be FAIR for once and how maybe it's about fucking time you started forcing a few things to be fair. You look at people and imagine them screaming and hands idiot flailing and mouth making noise that doesn't mean anything. you think about intestines and lungs and brain and how you'd have that for the rest of your life, a secret little three-D movie in your head of how, just once, somebody paid. Somebody paid, and you were in charge, just once. Damn it, just once.

You know, in dreams, if I hit people, nothing happens.  It doesn't phase them at all.  Either I can't hit hard enough, like my hands are all, feeble, or they can't even see me, look right through me. I’m invisible, I’m invisible, I’m invisible.

It changed my eyes, somehow. That much REM and daydream with that much red screenburned my retinas. Maybe that’s why it’s generally accepted that demons have red eyes.

People moved out of my way in the school, in the hall, on the bus, in the mall, on the street.

Maybe they could see the future.  Maybe they could see what they looked like to me, like anatomy books waiting to happen, machining around in the right clothes with the right friends and such a brainless little shallow set of thoughts. Prom, new fucking Lexus, having your teeth bleached and your eyebrows waxed and a facial and a scholarship.  A free ride to some college where you can throw a football for four years and get handed a paper that you hand to somebody else at the end of it and they give you more money than anybody should have, more money than a protein error like you needs, more money than even Daddy makes.

I look in the mirror and I realize that I’m not human, never was, and that what I would really still like, is a hydrogen bomb.

You're waiting for the One Big Thing that isn't something you went through. You're waiting for me to explain the schizophrenia or brain tumor or alien abduction that will draw the line between You (fucked up, dysfunctional, victim of Amerikan society and capitalism) and Me (fucked up, dysfunctional, victim of Amerikan society and capitalism, who became a vicious serial killer.) 

Well, you're in for a long look. 

_I don't know what the difference is._

Psychological abuse? You decide. I would say yes, but kids go through worse and don't become whatever I am. Maybe it's a careful alchemical balance of all that control, of all that powerlessness, of my weird appetites, of my gayness and the static it brought down on me. 

Maybe there is no difference. The Catholic church still has a doctrine that thought is the same as deed. I can see the logic in that. Can’t you?

 

**FOUND**

 

When I was eighteen I found the only woman I will ever love. Her name was Shelley. She was fourteen feet of green 1975 El Camino. It was like finding an old friend, from another life, maybe. 

When my mother drove past her I threw a _fit_ for her to turn around. She would not. 

I called Dad the minute I got home and calmly told him that I was going to buy that car and he could either help me or get out of my way, but it’d be nice if he’d let me know now, because it was going to be a long walk to the bank and then back to the car. The next day he took me and about half of my savings to the car lot.  There was much boring grownup bullshit between them and me and them and Dad, and in the end I gave Dad about two-thirds of the cost to ransom Shelley, in cash.  He gave the dealers the entire (lower) cost in cash on the spot, and we wrote out a contract between us for me to pay the rest in monthly payments, of which I never missed a single one.   She came in very handy when he kicked me out just after Christmas that same year.

My mother hadn’t touched a drink in years. Instead she found a doctor who would keep her supplied with various pills for various things about reality she wanted to alter.  She started going more crazy when I was in middle school. By the time I graduated highschool she was doing stuff like calling me at work, and having a perfectly normal (if pointless and meandering) polite conversation, then yelling at ME not to call HER anymore and sobbing that I always yell at her, when in fact she was the one who called me and nobody had done any yelling.  

She did shit like that all the time. 

Except she’d added it to her usual run and cry to Dad and then he’d scream at me that if I couldn’t be nice to Mom he’d kick me out. The problem was that I WAS being nice to her, and I couldn’t think of any way to stop doing something I wasn’t doing.  So I started socking away money again.  I was in college and working, both pretty much full time, though between the car and the fact that Mom would present me with little bills for stuff I hadn’t asked her to do-like digging through my drawers and washing and rewashing my clothes-I couldn’t save very fast.

Apparently the last straw was one day when I came home from class I said, “Are we having spaghetti again?” 

I meant nothing by it whatsoever except, small talk. If I _didn’t_ talk to her I’d get in trouble for “ignoring her” and “rudeness” so I had to say something. She screamed and cried that I criticized her constantly and that I yelled at her all the time. I only saw her for about three minutes a day, so I have no idea how I managed to do all that so _quickly._ She threw shit at me until I gave up and drove to work early to get away from the insanity. I didn’t eat, incidentally. I was too busy ducking. Sometimes she’d hit me and eventually I’d have to hold her hands and then she’d scream at Dad that I attacked her, so there was nothing I could do but flee once she got physical. 

I came home from work-eight hours after five of classes, just for the sake of the fucking record, and found Dad and Mom sitting in their car with the engine running. Dad screamed at me to get in. For some reason I did. I think, in my idiocy, I thought maybe I was saving Mom more trouble, though why I cared about that at this point I can’t say. Biological drive, maybe.

He was drunk out of his mind, and she was sobbing that I’d been so horrible to her she’d done nothing but cry for the last year and she wanted me gone. I was told if I couldn’t stop being such a bastard to her-again-I could get out. That was pretty much enough of that.

Two hours of this. I’m not exaggerating. All over Jacksonville with him screaming at me.  How he didn’t kill us is beyond me. At one point I realized I still had my backpack with my tape player, and I snuck one earphone up to my ear and listened to the Cure’s cover of “Purple Haze” over and over until he stopped in our driveway again. Then I got out, got back into my car, and left. A box marked TOYS-KEEP-FUTURE KIDS already lived permanently behind the seat.

I went from couch to couch. Most places I noticed my rent seemed to increase exponentially month after month, generally in direct proportion to how much rent the official roommates didn’t feel like coughing up. Then it was the end of the semester-I passed everything, I think, I can’t remember and no one has ever really cared-and school informed me that without a loan that my Dad had to cosign for I couldn’t come back next year. 

I explained that I no longer lived with Dad and hadn’t for six months and that he would not piss on me if I were on fire and hung up whenever I called. I explained-which seemed retarded, in my Baphomet shirt and eyeliner and tights-that I was a queer Satanist and that was the tip of the Dad-isn’t-gonna iceberg. I explained that I was not quite this skinny by choice.

They explained that it didn’t matter.

Until I was twenty-five, no matter where I lived or who paid for what little food I managed to get, whether my sperm donor gave me a dime or not, his money counted towards my income. 

Therefore, at that time, in my gig at a fucking drugstore in the mall, at about a quarter above minimum wage and thirty or so hours a week (which added to classes had me “working” around seventy) with gas, car payments, insurance, textbooks, rent and food, I made too much money to get financial aid. 

However, despite HIS money deciding whether I had to GET the loan, whether or not I could get it without a cosigner ONLY counted my own, personal income-for repayment, not need. So of course, even when I lied hollow-eyed about my costs of living, I did not qualify. 

Isn’t that cute? Isn’t that as cute as them teaching you math you’ll never need to teach you logic, thereby proving they shouldn’t be teaching anyone anything like logic?

See how They cheat? 

All the time. Every time. I promise you, o my brother or sister-they cheat, every time, all the time. All the shiny happy regurgitated Civics they ever told you about grownups and authority figures being there to help you is bullshit. They’re there to get what they can out of you. They’re there to make sure that YOU are there in their places so this entire disgusting slave-system can continue. They don’t care what happens to you. They PRETEND THEY DO so you’ll comply.

I tell you that not to hurt you-I tell you that because I love you and I’m praying you can internalize it from this “fiction” and maybe, at least, go into your life with open eyes. Save you the time and trouble and hurt I’ve had to slog through. Leave you slightly better armed. It’s all I can offer you, kids. Sorry. 

Are you starting to understand this yet? No? It's okay. I guess I don't really expect that of anybody, anymore. Nevermind. You’ll never understand that part of it. You have to either do it, see it, or have it done to you. This is the closest I can get you to seeing it, but I’m doing my best. 

I think of you as a....me. A baby me, a sixteen-year-old me hiding this book and reading it while you listen to all the music your parents hate and that I’ve made you want to buy. So that you have....another one. One of Us. One you can talk to any time you want, one who says the things you’re afraid to even think. One that Christopher Scarver cannot delete.

I’m not going to lie to you. I love you too much to hurt you that way. 

The cage gets a little bigger, that's all, but the bars are still there, just like always. 

I was finally free of school, and nobody wanted me outside any more than they’d wanted me inside. I’d gotten away from my parents, and discovered that they’d implanted themselves in my head where they could tell me how worthless I am at all hours of the day and night for the rest of my life, even though I’ve already learned this particular truth just fine, thanks.. 

Now I go to a pointless fucking job instead of a pointless fucking school, but I've still got no choice, just like always. The same beautiful people with the same eighty-dollar haircuts and two hundred dollar shoes are still permanently on an invisible rung above me. They get promoted and boss me around and have money to buy lunch and go to bars after work, and actually go somewhere on their vacations instead of sitting at home smoking pot and watching bootleg concerts and adding new scars to the old ladders. Now when I get polite harassment about the black I can say it's religious and say ACLU and they shut the fuck up. They figure at least I’m clean and can speak English and do basic math and show up on time. Even if I do have a pentagram ring and a weird car. 

But a raise? A promotion? Enough money to pay rent someplace with working plumbing and doorknobs that don't come off in my hand? 

Oops, clank, smacked your forehead right into the bars, didn't you, freakboy, Satanist, faggot? 

I can keep my black clothes in closets, drawers, heaps on the floor. I can put autopsy photos and pictures of men in makeup kissing on my walls and Mom doesn't come in and freak. I can sit online if I’m so inclined and look at deathporn and fisting and anarchy sites and antichristian manifestos. I don't have to sit there agonizing over whether I figured out how to delete the record of the sites I hit so Dad doesn't have a brain embolism. Doesn't matter. If the police ever seize my computer I can kiss my ass goodbye anyway, so I look at all the murder I want. 

I can leave my weed and my pipe on my coffee table. I don't have to masturbate quietly. I can keep the King and the Clive Barker and the Dahmer and the serial killer books and the Crowley books and the Necronomicon and the LaVey on a bookshelf instead of a lockbox.. Dad isn’t fucking here to yell at me about some bullshit primrose path. 

_You want to go next door and kill the neighbor's beautiful little girl, beautiful darling sweet innocent little girl, is that what you want? That's what the Devil wants you to do._

All sticky and delirious and self-righteous and drunk, drunk, drunk, and convinced that _he_ knows the Devil better than I do, when he's never even met the guy.

No, that's not what I want, but you're close, all right, in your narrow little television way, but if you had any vague conception of what I REALLY want, it might drive you to…what? Drink? Hate me? What? Let's just say she's not my type, Dad. Too young and too girl. Just watch the motherfucking news and yell about the queers and how they have no business wanting the special right not to get shot at, or the special right to keep a job, or the special right to raise a family. Just yell at something besides me for a while. Hate something else for a change. 

Now, when I go out at night I use the door. It's almost like being a citizen. I get into Shelley and drive instead of walking, with those same honey leather cocaine rum voices that love me wrapped all around me, making me drive faster, faster. And if anybody wants to ask me about whether I’m a faggot or a Satanist, I can drive away. Or I could drive over them, though so far I’ve resisted the temptation. 

At night I lie alone in the same bed and listen to the same bands. They still understand me and they're still just as close as my stereo. 

And I still think about the cold blue of a swimming pool.


	3. Psychomotor Agitation--Lady Stardust (rough cut)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our favorite serial killer is all grown up, and has a very productive night in which he catches one that is actually worth particular care and devotion. And elaborate sticky redecoration.

I paid too much at the door because there was some kind of unforeseen live band. Maybe good, maybe the ruining factor of the night. Depends on the band. As an added drag on my mood the middle room is curtained off and guarded by large thugs, meaning it is the band's dressing room, meaning we are confined to the tiny dance-floor. Meaning the Camel Wides I am carrying packed with weed are unusable. Damn it.

I crowd myself into a niche down front, off to one side. Smoke and wait. This band that is ruining my night is called Mourning Glory, I gather from various posters. Bitches. The name is really pretty and it would've been easier to be mad at them if it was something ridiculous. 

I'm expecting very little until the lights go down and the noise begins.  
I've named this one Lady Stardust. He isn't in bright blue jeans. Black vinyl. Fishnet shirt with the little electrical-tape crosses over his nipples, universally scorned by all three self-titled "real" goths in Florida. I wonder how long the tape would stretch if I bit and pulled before it came off before my thoughts dissolve into _ngggh._ That's the closest I can come to spelling the consonants-only exhalation of pure fucking lust. 

He's taller than my usual, chin-height to me instead of sternum-height. Spiky, gleaming black hair, fine aristocratic lines, eyes the color of the swimming-pool I still dream about. No lipstick, black eyeliner. He moves like a cat. He takes the microphone and nods and waits. I can't remember a thing about his band, I don't think I spared them a glance. 

I'm so up front. 

There are probably less than a hundred people at this show. The stage is a grand total of about a foot and a half high. So he's right, fucking, there. Any minute now I'll catch his scent. 

Lady Stardust sings his song, and yes, it's probably of darkness and disgrace. I'm not able to notice. He's so good you can feel the silence fall, so good he is suddenly literally the only sound in the building. His voice moves like a bird in flight. It rolls out of him in one effortless sine-wave. He's fearless. There's something of Robert Smith in the anguished falsetto, something of Murphy in the soaring crystalline tenor. He's singing so hard he shouldn't be pretty anymore, but oh, how he is. I want to bite the end of that voice and chew until I reach the mouth that made it. 

My mind is hissing a sly running tirade of _I need him I'll have this one all fucking week I put up with and waited for and all my life and it went so badly last time and I. Will. Have. This one._

And then his monitor goes out. 

I'm close enough to see him glance down at the equipment, to hear that something is gone but not talented enough to know exactly what. He does a feeble kick at it, still singing. After a minute or so he just stops and addresses someone at the back of the room. "It's completely gone, you have to do something about it." He tries to drop back into the song, flustered and.....blushing, for a line or two, before he gestures for the band to just, stop. 

My nails are digging into my palm like they talk about in horror novels. Ha, I mean in _other_ horror novels. 

In the real world I'd have rushed the stage, snatched him, dragged him back to my Lair and eaten him very slowly.

Well, all right, that IS pretty much what happened, except I didn't really eat any, and I managed a tiny bit more tact than that. 

"You sound great," I tell him, loud enough for him and everyone else to hear me in the music-free air. I'm not particularly eloquent on such short notice. I feel the brain threatening to feel stupid and I tell it to go fuck itself. 

He laughs. He looks, defused. It helps that there are whistles and a brief staccato of applause from people agreeing with me. He has a beautiful motherfucking collarbone All angle and hollow.

"I _know,_ but I can't hear myself and then I can't do...what I do...."

So there, insecurity. It seems to be, working. Whatever the fuck I'm trying to do.

"Watch our faces. You're doing it. Trust me." 

Nobody laughs that time. Though some do clap.

Lady Stardust is doomed. It's much too late for anything else. 

Anything I want that much must be rightfully mine. If it weren't meant for me it wouldn't _push_ those buttons. 

Never mind. Anyone not nodding yet will never know what I mean. 

This is probably the only situation on Earth where you're allowed to stare at a real live boy in this particular way. He spends a few minutes of the next hour or so staring back at me. Sometimes he gives me the ghost of a smile. He has the sort of teeth you want to grind your own teeth against. He keeps catching my eye, as if he's in on the....joke. He's unspeakably touchable, like his sculptor kept a wall covered with photos of tomcats leaping, sprawled, hunting, to keep those lines of force in his mind. When he turns at the waist the flesh of his stomach does something that makes my tongue cramp. 

It's over, much too soon, much too late. The predictable close-out chaos of noise. 

_(i will i have to i will i can't just once and it went so quickly last time and just, this, once)_

He stands with his shoulders heaving, catching his breath, holding the mic in a way that is so Bowie I have to knot my toes in my boots to keep from literally jumping him. Hip cocked, smirk, poise. Fucking Hell. 

I keep thinking _a love, I could not obey._

 

By any standards except mine Lady Stardust is far more valuable a catch than the boy who haunts me. He's flawlessly, magazine-beautiful, and a higher rank in the bedpost-notch sense. Meaning, it's way cooler to run down the lead singer of a really good band than a pretty college student and sandwich shop employee. But I'm not the least bit nervous. Because I don't love this one at all.

We're both backstage. He's standing at what used to be a restaurant table, doing makeup repair in one of those mirrors that plugs in and has little banks of lights up each side. It's the only light in this curtained-tent of a room. He nudges the mirror with a fingertip so we can see one another in it. "I don't know what the word for heckling somebody in a helpful way is, but you were great at it. Thanks."

"Cheerleading?"

He laughs. So do I. _I can smell him._ Push the advantage. "You guys were lucky. Last band they couldn't get the sound and the lights on at the same time." This is a lie. 

He lifts one shoulder in something too cool to be a shrug, re-drawing a black line under one American-blue eye. "I'm--"

"Lady Stardust. I know. I'm Erik."

He doesn't correct me, which is good, because by any other name he'd become, normal, or something Contaminated. "Holy shit. Half the kindergoths here wouldn't know Bowie if he walked up and set them on fire."

"Most of what I heard in the audience was Peter Murphy. About you, I mean."

"If you're trying to flatter me, it's working." Eye number two. Then powder with delicate little pressing motions. I close my trenchcoat, hoping either he doesn't notice or it looks casual, because my cock is so hard I'm afraid he will see it even in this utter lack of light. He has to lean over too much table to get at the mirror, elbow pushing a wake in a chaos of clattering makeup. His fishnet shirt has ridden up, and there's an ellipse of bare skin at the small of his back. I'm going to fucking tear out my laboriously-inserted lip ring if he doesn't straighten up in the next four seconds. 

"So what're you guys doing after this?" A gesture encompassing the club that he doesn't see, and his band, which I don't see. 

He does that one-shoulder shrug again. More teeth-flickers. "Karl always fucking wants to drive back. They're probably already gone. I'll hide out here till the crowd wanders off and get a room."

"We could sneak off and smoke, if you wanted."

A wistful sigh. "I don't smoke anymore. Voice."

"But I have opium."

This may possibly be a lie. I can't remember if I smoked it all or not. Whatever works. No gothboi ever could resist the quintessentially goth nature of opium. 

He tilts his head without doing the shrug, and I know I've got him. 

There will be candy. Just get in the car.

 

I leave the way I came, through the curtain. Buy and fucking inhale a rum and coke. Itty out to my car. He's already outside through Hell knows which fire exit, huge plastic suitcase dragging one arm down. The plan is almost derailed once we get out into the parking lot; he wants to take his car, an amusingly huge Buick LeSabre painted spray-can black and absolutely covered with a treasure-trove of oldschool capital-G Goth stickers. 

I persuade him it's easier if he just rides with me and I run him back. This is another lie. 

Once he sees my El Camino, he's enchanted enough to agree. She looks damn good with this spider from Mars slouched in her passenger seat with one delicate boot out the window.

When we've gotten to my Lair I get him settled with rum and coke and dig through my stashes. I have a pipe I use for only opium; I scrape the Hell out of it and roll the result in a lot of very good weed. I pick up two Klonopin on the way, and once I get back to the counter I use for a bar I make him a Screaming Nazi shot to which I add the pills and a dropper full of GHB. 

I make my own shot with slightly fewer ingredients. He can't resist the name, and we do them in near-unison. Once it's in my mouth I become convinced I've given him the clean one, but once I swallow I know I didn't. 

He laughs, coughs, waxes poetic about just how awful his drink is, daubs at his watering eyes with one long black fingernail, declares it the worst drink ever invented. It's so awful you can't taste anything in it. It's Jagermeister and fucking Rumpleminze, for the love of Hell. The weirdness of the GHB is unnoticeable, and even if you chew Klonopin they taste like diluted sugar. I forget what I was supposed to take them for, but they render you tranquil and extremely unable to do complicated shit like walk around.

I stole this trick from Dahmer, if you hadn't already guessed. The pills in a drink, I mean. How amusing that they give angry psychotics such pills to keep us calm. I think Jeff was using Xanax. I forget. 

The drugs are because of the fucking issues with dragging, carrying, and tying people, without them managing to kick me in the nose, teeth, or balls, or making enough noise to summon cops. 

I'm getting better at this with practice. That's the plan, anyway.

I'm not wasting this one the way I did Jamie. 

We're talking through most of this. I spare you because most of what I'm saying is, fake, and because you're skimming this anyway to get to the good part. 

We talk about makeup and drugs and how truly fucking awesome his band is. That last part isn't fake. I'm having some small guilt, here, because I'm getting ready to deprive the world of this band. It's that good, if you like lush heartbroken goth, and I do. But what better end for the lead singer? It'll make him vaguely famous, complete the tragic-deliciousness of his music. That's so circular and perfect that I know I have to do this. He's FOR me. 

Lady Stardust settles with his knees bent and his bootheels on the edge of the couch. It does extremely slutty things to his crotch. I remind myself to thank Lucifer for those pants, because they have to be His doing Hell. Fire. And a lot of damnation. I sit cornered to him, replace his beer with a rum and coke. We smoke the semi-opium, so I can watch his eyes drifting closed with pleasure and chemistry. Smudge of eyelashes clotted with mascara.

"So you knew about Bowie being, like, bi, right?"

I'm nodding at this. I'm on my second rum and diet Coke and I realize I'm in the buzzy-pleasant state of drunk that is so hard to maintain. I'm forgetting not to enjoy myself. "Married to Claire-something before Iman."

"For a long time. Both of them fucking whoever they wanted. I always thought that made so much sense." 

I'm still nodding. Shut up. I'm dense, and I don't think of myself as marketable. 

"See, I totally, get that. My ex-girlfriend thought it was hot for me to fuck around with other boys, but she was, such a fucking bitch, otherwise." 

That's when I realize this is a come-on. 

The beast is crawling in my hands and my teeth and my cock and my mouth. I grab his head and kiss him, kiss him, and the beast is swarming into his throat like a hive of bees. He tastes of rum, of smoke, and if I kiss deeper still I can still taste the licorice-death of the Rumpleminze. I can't stop replaying that thought from the show; the wish to crawl inside him, and I'm trying to lick his tonsils, I swear, trying to tear up the tip of my tongue on his teeth, trying to split both our lips. 

His knees come up and he hugs me tighter than tight with legs and arms and does something like a little I-win purr. It makes me open my eyes for a second, in something like wonder I can smell the powder he's wearing. And then he bites my tongue, just hard enough to hurt, sort of dragging his teeth along and nipping into the very tip hard enough to make me yelp and slap him. I don't manage to do it very hard or very well. We stare at one another. He makes some noise, and it is not a quit-it sort of noise. Then he kisses me, with a lot of suction and a lot of pulling with his legs, arching with his back. Like he's trying to, climb me. Like he's trying to eat me, or trying to help me eat him.

Then we're on the floor. I'm on top of him. He's extremely happy about this fact. So am I. Having my cock suddenly and without fucking warning crammed against his costill in those oilspill pants is an extremely fucking nice surprise. I need to do this a lot more, often. And harder. I can taste his breath, taste the lungs behind it, taste the voicebox that made that motherfucking music.

I say _you little bitch_ and he says _yes_ and I say _I'll fucking kill you_ and he says _yes, yes, yes._

The edges are blurring. I hold him down with my hips and drag up his shirt in gestures that make our shadows look like we're fighting. Part of me is standing back in my head, waiting, for, something. The pants squeak under my hands like a raincoat. Synthetic. I get the bastard fly unbuttoned and he's moaning long spools of that voice into my mouth. 

I can't swallow fast enough. His pants hang unstoppably at the knee, caught by those eyelet-riddled boots. A lot of teeth-drag when I predator my mouth away from his. A lunge that stops at his stomach to leave bite after bite, almost too hard and definitely too fast, and another pull-drag that has him laughing a little and screaming under his breath. I'm a rollercoaster he's riding. 

He hisses _careful_ at me, raises himself up on one elbow. I slam him back down with one hand to his chest and it feels incredibly, leonine. It drives a tiny sound out of him. He stays. Good boy. I struggle to play nice, drawing long lazy licks across his stomach and up his thighs. Apparently he shaves everything, and apparently he's done so very recently. If I lick hard enough in some places I can just get a rasp in return, but only just. 

Must, not, eat. 

He's hard against my cheek, cock dragging through my hair. The smell of him is making me, drool, and the motherfucking effort not to, turn, into a werewolf, is, making me shudder like I'm cold. I shove his thighs apart hard and do digging, pulling little pinches with my nails, restraining myself back into a soothing pet I don't mean just when his wails really start to delight me. The kicking is awful cute. And it's getting weaker, and, weaker.

I didn't give him enough to knock him out, but he's going to be non-functionally fucked up right, about, now. 

He's not going to miss anything, but all he can do is squirm in that darling way, like he's trapped in quicksand. It's gotten to his mind and not just his body. The moans are liquid and edgeless, noise feathering into anguished little arpeggios. It's like I'm, playing him. 

I bury my face against his cock, i n h a l e, and he feels my fingernails and my fingertips much too close to the cheek of his ass and he says _don't._ It confuses me. He hasn't made any words in awhile. He says no without much, enthusiasm. I put my fingers in my mouth and then shove two inside him without asking. 

Whatever he's trying to say climbs through his teeth like a bonesaw hitting a screw. His hands smack into my head, and then knot in my hair. He tries to close his legs and it sort of pins my hand, and it's delicious. He's not trying very hard to push me off. I think he's too, stunned, to. Oh, and much, much too high. I pull his dick into my mouth with tongue and lips and teeth and hook my fingers in his ass and sort of yank him towards my face by his pelvic bone. 

He's still making various subnotes of distress but that long liquid moan is taking the lead. I mouth that he's _such a good boy,_ but I don't think he can hear me. He's pulling my hair like he wants to get me away from him, but it isn't very sincere. It's increasingly difficult to be this, nice. I settle in on the head of his dick and use too much teeth, hold him with too much thumbnail. It's the thumbnail that does it, I think, because he slams against my face and wails and wails, coming and coming and almost-crying. 

Swallowing is the best part. It's like...hmm...irreversible. And unless you're playing some weird game with it or you miss, it never was in the, outside world. Just inside him, and then inside me. It's, magick. It's pure. 

He laughs again, when he can get his breath. It's feeble. "So, fucked up..."

"Yes, you are, " I tell him 

"...bleeding?"

"Not yet." This is a lie, I discover while licking my fingers. Un-translatable all-consonant noise from me . 

"...cool..."

I come up for air and meth. I bring him some on a Deathstyle CD case, just a taste, not even a line. "Lick it."

"Crazy fuck." He's grinning. He crooks his head, darts out a perfect pink triangle of tongue, draws it in again with a little white fast-fading smudge on the tip. Swallows, grimacing. It's mostly to keep him being too sedated. I lick the CD case after he does. It's not because I am worried about wasting the meth.

"Can you sit up?" 

He's still lying on the carpet, crumpled, sweating, with his shirt up around his chest and his pants around his knees. He manages to kind of squirm into a zigzag. The little ridge of spine jutting up is so reptilian and so dear that it really is hurting my jaw just to look at it without licking it. 

I can't express to you how motherfucking pretty this is. You'd have to have been there. I regret the fuck out of not filming these. Why I didn't get a shitty video camera from a pawn shop is beyond me. 

He kind of swings his feet till he flops over on his back with his legs still all crooked and splayed. He raises his arms and does something very funny that looks like a both-hands sieg heil a few times. Then he announces, "Nope," and giggles about this for a minute. So do I, because I can't help it. 

"What did you give me?

"All sorts of shit." I light a cigarette. Sit in my desk chair, turned around away from The Novel for once so I can watch the show. 

He stops sieging Heil and ponders this. One hand flops at his pants, drags them up a useless four inches or so, not even clearing his thighs, subsides. I don't even think he knew he was doing it. A subconscious little flicker of feeling, unsafe. So good. His cock is still wet, and still twitching idly now and then.

"I meant, just now."

"Oh. Meth."

That's still not adding up for him. It's like a guessing game. I draw blood from my own lip again, but it's still a grin. My cigarette needs flicking too badly for me to make it to the ashtray, so I flick it and rub it into the carpet with my boot without looking. 

"Did you give me something else I forgot?" 

Aw. How diplomatic of him. He's getting more slurred by the minute, but still somehow clearer than before because he's trying harder. He knows something important is wrong. There's no fear-scent yet, but he's definitely on yellow alert. Lord, no wonder Dahmer used this. It's like bondage you don't have to keep fucking with. 

"Opium, and some weed in that, and tranquilizers and G in your drink. I'm pretty sure that's it so far."

He raises a foot that time. Heelthud into carpet. This time he manages to pull his pants up, too, but not exactly fasten them. He rolls over to one side, little hairsprayed-messes in his eyes. Mumbles, "That's really fucking cute of you, have to...gonna call a cab and get a room because at this hour..." Quiet. He has no idea how long he's been here. "Checkout before I can fucking...sleep..."

"No. You're staying here."

"...really, rather..." He's sitting up, but he's listing sharply to fucking port, and wobbling in every direction at once somehow, like the spine I was just admiring is no longer strong enough to hold up his lovely head. His arms are sort of out, which is very LeClaire of him, like he's trying to balance with them, or they're broken. "...get, going, I'm used to hotels...."

"You're not going anywhere. Ever again. I've decided to keep you." His rum and coke is half-untouched on the coffee table. I help myself to it.

He gives up the sitting thing, and kind of flips back down again like a rocking chair falling over. His pants are still mostly down, just framing half a bitemark I left low on the white plane of his stomach. He stares up at the ceiling, panting a little still. I wonder if he's realized nobody knows where he is. Drugs still nowhere near done with him. 

He thinks awhile longer and concludes, "Hot." 

I agree with him completely. 

Then, I swear to you, he goes, "I could crash on your couch, I guess." As if we're negotiating. I'm this close to rum and coke in my nose. I mean it. It's stoner-funny. Invisible ropes that he's kind of tentatively starting to struggle against. 

"Wherever you end up."

That's perfect. That lets him continue to pretend that he maybe he's wrong. Maybe I'm teasing. Maybe it's a form of "Stay for dinner, I insist." or the struggle to pick up the tab somewhere. 

What a lovely joke. I'm thinking of Jamie relaxing when I told him he had a concussion. Delicious. 

I wonder how long I can sustain it. 

And my, the ramifications of THAT terrible idea.

He's considering. I go and stand over him and stare down into his puzzled eyes. "Do you want some water?"

A frown. A nod . I bring him an opened bottle of it, cold from the fridge, with more G in it. He's still too able to move.

 

Apparently I've hit on a good balance, because while he can still squirm, just enough, and moan plenty, his troublesome ability to almost sit up is utterly gone. I have to half-carry and half drag him to the bathroom. He makes little sex-or-ow noises at things that I wouldn't have called particularly stimulating. Drugs. Thank Hell for drugs. I lay him on the rug with a folded towel under his head and wet a washcloth and wipe his face, his chest. He makes a grateful noise that is priceless in its sincerity. I switch to colder water and it seems to increase his joy.

I pull his shirt and sort of hook it behind his head, so it's just fishnet-arms, and I finally, finally get to bite that motherfucking electrical tape. It's gotten semi-sticky-slidy, which is always what happens when you wear the shit. Gums up my lips and his chest and we stick to each other like my mouth is trying to grow into his nipple. I don't bite, but I threaten to until he's whining in a way that makes me think again of dogs. I stroke his head to soothe him, and he shudders, and the whine gets softer. Looser. I stroke him until he believes me, and _then_ I bite him.

He crescendos immediately to the best he can do for a scream, which is quiet enough that I doubt anyone could hear it over the faucet in the hallway. It's like his lungs are as.....limp, as sedated...as the rest of him. He can't push the music out past his ribcage, but I hear him. No one else in the world can hear it. Maybe I don't regret not making tapes, after all. 

"Hush. Beautiful boy. I'm not going to bite it off." Joke just for me. I kneel up, grab Vaseline and dip the washrag in it, rub it into these tape-sticky poor wounded nipples with businesslike little scrubs. He whimpers and arches at me, and circles make him sustain-moan and hold himself arched. Pretty, pretty fucking boy. I drag his pants back down just enough and turn him over on his face and spread his ass open with one hand, and stroke him into a series of wails that are such perfection I keep doing it long, long after the really minimal blood is gone. Such drama, this one. It makes me want to give him something to really cry about. 

I grope above my head on the counter until I find the Vaseline again, and I use much too much and push one finger inside him over and over again, all the way out, all the way in, just to hear his increasingly frustrated little protest-noises. Whenever he summons up the flail to approach rolling over I push it in hard and deep and hold him, still, that way, and he wails like I've killed him and immediately stops squirming. I rock my hand into him, to hear him try to get louder. Mine, mine, mine. I pull my finger out and forget about the Vaseline until I've already put it in my mouth. Chin and tongue slicked with that bacon-grease texture and inexplicably vivid taste. 

I sort of crawl, up him, hands slipping in grease and on tile and making a mess of the rug. He feels me come up over him and rears up under me, trying to throw me off and only succeeding into thumping into me in a series of sticky skin-impacts. I put one knee on the back of his thigh, leaving a trail of Vaseline on my shirt and my waist and my zipper. 

"...don't..." That laugh. Kind of a toddler-style, all the limbs at once, kick. A pretend temper tantrum. "I don't do this." That was very clear, and probably took a lot of effort, considering he's facefirst in the towel and still giggling. 

"It doesn't work that way anymore." Dreamy. Spreading him open with my thumbs, just to scare him. Getting my pants down and my cock arranged and knee-ing his legs together and sitting on his thighs. I keep thinking, _look what I found._ To think I was pissed off about the cover charge. That makes me laugh, and he laughs too, because it's contagious. I spread him again and kneel forward and thump at him with my erection, and he does a long wail that's artfully petulant and ends in another giggle. "You can't tell anyone..."

I'm going to fall off him if he makes me laugh any harder. Something has to be an unprecedented kind of wrong with this if we're both still having this much fun. Give me a minute, here. "Oh, I won't."

"And you have to use a condom."

Darling. A _condom._ If you knew the bodily fluids we're going to share. 

"I don't have to do anything, anymore."

This Peter Murphy boy, this David Bowie boy. This Velvet Goldmine boy. I've wanted to make this archetype scream since I was about thirteen years old, and I think it's going to be awhile before I'm tired of it. I slam inside him and feel him go, still, and he knows, he knows and I can almost, hear, his pupils dilate. 

I get all the scream I ever could have asked for. He runs out of breath, shaking under me, a r o u n d me. I turn his head and do something too mean to be kissing and fuck him, fuck him. I feel the inhale lock inside him and I pull at his mouth with my lips and my lungs, until I feel the triumph of his breath whistling past this knot in his throat.

Am I his shock, this shock, this loud, this irreversible, this important in the universe of a creature this unspeakably...

I push his squirming hands up over his head like I'm making him make a snow, angel. All my weight is on him and my cock is much too deep and he's sobbing, trying to spread his knees, choking _stop, stop._ He's so, easy, to hold down. I pin his legs tighter together. I'm snarling. I used to dream of being some kind of...pterodactyl....of dropping that shadow across a crowd of humans and plummeting down at them like an arrow, catching up a squirming crunchy screaming red mouthful. Did I ever tell you that?

There's one fast thud that I particularly like that he seems to find particularly agonizing. Perfect. Faster. Faster.

His wrists in my hands. My fingers in his mouth. Dragging at an earring my teeth found. He's crying against my palm. Mine, mine, mine.

"Now, you're bleeding." 

He can't move but I can see this information make him want to. Or maybe I'm reading his mind. I spread his ass with my hands and lick from the base of his balls to his tailbone, tasting us both. He's silent, quivering. I wonder if it's embarrassment or fury or arousal. 

I start on the top of his bootlaces. It frustrates me into using scissors pretty quickly. He insists on turning his face and manages "...drive..."

"You'd never make it to the driveway. Quit flexing your toes."

He watches me take off his pants. Sighs in serious relief at the drop in temperature. It upsets him that he's not getting his way. Or that I've ruined his boots. Flicker that he ought to be grateful. Instead, it makes him cry harder for some reason for me to throw his fishnet-shirt over onto the laundry pile. 

I take off my clothes, run a bath. climb in with him and wash him, or something like it. 

He keeps expecting me to hurt him again; I can feel him, cringe, when I move too quickly. He doesn't smell like actual fear. He's still hard. 

I wash his hair, with extreme care not to get soap in his eyes, and I drain the water around us and get both of us out of the tub without anyone falling into any porcelain. I clean off his ruined makeup with remover that won't sting even if he does squirm like a kid getting eyedrops and wreck my aim from time to time. There. 

"Do you want me to draw it on again?"

He won't answer me. He's not exactly crying, now. Unresponsive. Internal negations. _Dear God, if you get me out of this, I will never, ever let anyone fuck me in the ass again. Please oh please. It's a dream. It's a little like teasing. A joke. I've just been raped._ Hazy impossible plan of flagging down a car in the middle of Nowhere, Florida at this hour of the night.

Without makeup, he's, unearthly. Childlike. It's too _Man Who Fell to Earth._ Wrong kind of hot.

I find waterproof eyeliner and put it on him. He holds his eyes and his face exactly the way I tell him to. He's earned an intermission. I let him have this Gethsemane. I let him lie there while I take down the shower curtain.

 

A tarp would be better but the only one I have is blinding blue. Pretty as lipstick, ugly as fuck for a serial murder backdrop. The shower curtain is black. Much better. I tested this already. I clip the edges up on three sides with those weird black-and-silver clips for too much paper, leave the bottom unclipped and bunched up into a black five-gallon bucket weighted with a brick at the foot of the bed. Scraps of wood are under the legs at the head of the bed. Just an inch or three of tilt, not enough to really feel when lying on it, but when I poured a cup of water onto the final result, it pooled on the shower curtain and more or less wound up in the bucket. I had to pick up the top to sort of pour in the last bit. Good enough. 

 

He makes happy noises when I finally manage to get him in bed. The crackle confuses him, but the pillow I slide under his head convinces him. I've tied both of his hands Jesus-spread before he really understands what I'm doing. The rope is over, under, around, and fucking through the box springs, and though I can't pull them off, holding the loose ends in my hands, it's never _really_ been tested. Here goes. 

I shush him and he subsides again, and I add "It's a game," and he does that one, shoulder, shrug. Sighs. The blindfold does beautiful things to his face. I miss the eyeliner, but the trick I have in mind requires the blindfold, and the, removal, will be worth the loss of eye contact. 

I stand back and squint at this. Black ropes, which were hard as fuck to find (home decor store) and the shower curtain is straight and it looks, lovely. All right. Ready as I'll ever be.

I get things, watching him squirm and tilt his head and worry about each little noise. I'm sure the drugs aren't doing much to clarify any data. So good. 

I plug in my old hair clipper and hold it beside his face. "Do you know what this is?" 

He doesn't feel like guessing. Click. Something is terribly wrong with it that I can't fix, and it goes CRACKZZZZzzzz like it's been struck by lightning when you turn it on. And then it does nothing but hum. He scrunches his face and his shoulder and his body away from this terrifying cattle-prod noise, mouth twisting into another _don't_. 

"It's a violet wand." I click it off, put it in the chair by my bed in a pile of laundry, so that he can't hear that I no longer have it.

He's panting again. That anticipation of pain is so da Vinci to watch. It's a fairy tale. 

I pick up an X-acto knife with a carefully not-quite-new blade. Brand new ones are too sharp, much too easy to cut too deep, and much too painless. It's clean, though probably not officially sterile. 

"Supposedly it feels exactly like a razor."

"Please--"

That was the very first please. It does something to the pit of my stomach, something irreversible. I watch him shake, bracing himself. I draw a very careful line, just a scratch, really, about as long as my hand, on his stomach just in the concave V of his ribcage. Arch. He grits his teeth; does that locomotive breathing I've gotten to know and love. Exhales. 

Relaxes. Mouths _god._ I wonder which god he means.

"Does it?" He slow-motion nods and slow-motion squirms like a snake drawing a useless S. Rolls towards my hand and the blade without meaning to. Mouths _fuck_ at me, and that's exactly what we're doing,. 

I wonder how long I can make him like this. Days, probably, if I manage a successful drug run. If anything was ever worth risking a sick day for three days of evil, it's this. 

A red line gets darker across his hips, not even really bleeding enough to trickle. I straighten him up and hold one hip down and draw another line just beside it, much faster. He howls out an anguished something that's wordlike enough to make me curious. "What?"

".....slower...please..." 

I can't get enough of that breathing. It's like he's been running. I put my cheek on his chest to appreciate it better, adding a snatch of surprisingly fast heartbeat. 

"Slower?" I slide up so I'm curled up on his chest like he's a pillow, holding the blade like I'm going to write something on his stomach, his thighs. I don't think I will, though. Draw, maybe, but not write. 

I'm going for a lot of symmetry, and the occasional repeated pattern. Like jewelry. 

He's too pretty to just _mangle._ I want to decorate him. 

Oh, never mind. Just watch. 

"Slower will take longer."

"....too fucking much, that fast. Please...."

I lean over letting my weight keep him still. Draw over each of my scratches again, until they end neatly at each hipbone and are uniformly deep enough to just bead up with blood. I do it slowly, because that's really not much for him to ask. And he asks, so, pretty. Such manners.

He isn't new to pain. I remind myself to check him for old scars. The thought that this boy would've wanted to cut himself up, alone in the dark, is terribly sad. I'm going to make it up to him right now. 

He draws in a breath when he feels me choose where to lay the blade and exhales long and slow and with a minimum of noise. He makes all the noise after the cut, like something that's about to become crying again, but softer, like half the upsetness is that he's so tired. I draw horizontal stripes down his thighs that I'll bring all the way around when I finally turn him over, and tiny Vs nestled in his hips. 

I have to lift the blade fast, sometimes, but having him pressed so close gives me kind of a kinetic warning before the pain makes him draw up a knee or slam up against me in protest. I really should tie his feet, but I'm enjoying how much wriggle he can manage with this much slack. 

So far there's only been a place or two where the knife slipped, and I don't suppose it'll really detract all that much when I'm finished.  
Sometimes I just kind of drag the tip along, here and there, not really meant to make a mark, or poke at him with the very point just to encourage this useless struggle. He's not being very sincere, not flailing with all of his strength the way he'd be doing without the violet wand myth. 

It amuses me that he's....playing along...

He's webbed with sort of freeform-straight lines, from about mid-thigh to waist. I'm saving the pink bits. Foreplay is important. I slide back closer to his head, still lying on him, still turned with my back to him and that long white skein of boy spread out under me. 

There's an increasingly large lot of red, but still not enough for there to be an actual pool of blood. If he feels the trickles despite the din of such hurt, I suppose he thinks it's sweat. Though I wonder why he can't smell it; it's driving me increasingly mad. That pennies-in-hand, old key, raw meat scent.

I cut a careful free-hand ellipse around his navel, holding the skin taut with my hand, holding him down with an elbow. I'm getting a lot of _please_ now, and a lot of noise before, during, and after each cut. And his dick is still hard. I put the scalpel in my teeth for a second and stroke one hand up his bleeding thigh and into a hairpin turn down around his cock, slicking him red. He gasps, key-changing immediately, and plants his feet on the bed and pushes into my hand. 

This is not what I expected. 

I'm probably as slack-jawed as the morons I make fun of have ever been. 

It's like Christmas. 

I switch hands, donating my left to his cock, retrieving the blade with my right. I add artistic little short lines in all the tendon-hollows of his hips. I turn the knife rather than lifting it and the drag of each direction-change makes him climb an octave, roll against my hand faster. 

I can't understand most of what he's saying, but it's to the tune of _please oh please, fuck you, you fucking, please, please, please._  
I'm making noise of my own, I realize, sometimes drowning him out. It sounds like I'm really enjoying something that really pisses me off, which is pretty close to the truth.

I lay the flat of the blade against the complicated folds of his scrotum; he screams under me like something dragging a scratch in glass and I hold his cock still and press, tiny, little, point-first dashes into the head in a descending ladder-lines towards the tip. He loses the end of that scream and moans in the most beautiful rolling tenor I ever inspired, coming on my hand, my face, the bed, the blade. 

 

His knees come up, thudding into me because I'm sprawled across his, lap, licking at this gorgeous slick mess of blood and come and sweat and boy. He's crying. I think I finally managed to take care of his case of the giggles. I want to keep him for days, weeks, I'll sell things and replace them when I get a new job, oh, I need this one. 

He's mine all mine. 

And he's open in tiny slits under my mouth, teases, just enough cut in the worst ones for me to have an edge to find and try to force my tongue inside. It's not enough; it's the same hieroglyph as that thing that happens when you're too drunk to be quite hard enough and he's at the wrong angle and your dick just will NOT go into his ass, and I look up at him and the knife is lazy in my hand like a dart more than a pencil, now, and I lift his balls with my tongue and pillow my cheek on his thigh and reach up, casual, it feels so casual. 

I thud the blade down like you might do to stick it into the top of a worktable, right below the very tip of his breastbone. At the best part of that fabulous motherfucking line that only Those Boys have, that line from chin, to throat, to starving-artist ribcage and stomach and cock. My knife is in the middle and it's a new hieroglyph now. 

He seems to be thrown, upwards, into the blade, and not away, back arching and arms pushing him towards me like he wants it in there. Like he wants it deeper and harder and I groan and I pull and I'm holding it there with my, fist, curled around it, and I pull it down that deep and at a perfect fucking right angle for about an inch, maybe a tiny bit more. The pull of cutting him, open, is like cloth and like clay and like vinyl and like none of those things, and there's almost a sound but not quite. Gorgeous, invisible reverberations of drag; of texture changes along the handle. The blade is not deep enough and too triangular to get stuck in mere skin and muscle and all the clever little things that bind the two. 

I lift it out. It still feels like careful, three-dimensional, drawing. Maybe this qualifies that thing to be called a scalpel, now?

 

He opens for me in a luscious wet thick gout of almost-violet.

Maybe I'm imagining the climb in that slaughterhouse smell.

The knife falls out of my hand, makes no noise on the carpet, and my hands come down on either side of him and my tongue is already out and I'm the motherfucking demon, now, oh how right my shoulders are, my hands, my mind. 

He's miles and miles below me, somewhere predators don't want to understand, saying _what did you do, oh my fucking god, what did you fucking just do_

I can't say anything anymore, but I think someplace _And now you're really, really bleeding_ and it makes me smile but my teeth can't manage that without my lips peeled back. 

I'm not touching him, except for my hair. It's getting clotted into stiff little jags. My dick is too hard to hang down. This is the hieroglyph that comes after the knifeline intersects the boyline. I'm e a rainbow, like an arc of dangerous electricity, tonguepointed and toescurled and s h a k i n g. Clear thread of saliva. I've wanted to do this all, my, life. 

I claw the shower curtain and it lifts him like a sling and it slams his wound into my lips, my chin, and finally mine you motherfucking bitch, tongue, inside him. Now scream. 

Lucifer fucking this, this, is what rimming makes me want. 

My brain is empty of everything but red and my mouth is empty of everything but red and I can feel this hurting him feel this hurting him feel the nerves sending quivering interrupted signals into this place where my tongue is inside him, feel the muscles fluttering like dreaming eyes under eyelids, trying to close push pull alter the fact of my tongue. We thud squishy back into the bed and he's howling, that noise can only be called, howling, and I slap my hands into his bird-bone-chest and spread the wound with my hands pointed into a diamond around it, tongue in the center. It probably looks violent, but it feels passionate.

Are you scared yet, my Velvet Goldmine boy? Does that still feel like a razor to you?

I close my lips around this, keyhole, suction at him and swallow and garglegrowl through blood and I might have come against his thigh, the bed, I don't know. It's not about my dick anymore. This appetite is not chasing that kind of orgasm. It's chasing the one I have from cerebral cortex to brainstem when I talon my hands off and the wound wet-noise petals as closed as it can.

I reach up and tear off his blindfold.

The look on his face and the churchbell screams make me want to be, inside him, and I hook at his wound and my fingers slidescratch gouge out again and I bite one of them by mistake. Everything is the same squirming red. I hook them in again and push, push, push, feeling my nails gristle through that last stubborn shred holding him closed, sink in all it once up to my palm into slippery hot space, into a world where a thousand things as soft as tongues wind around my fingers. 

I'm pinning him under me, my knees tight around his ribs. He's sobbing words that make no sense, the struggle stirring my fingers inside him. Sometimes his legs come up in bicycling spasms, uselessly thudding his thighs into my ass. I pull, feeling the start of more tearing, feeling my tongue follow my fingernails. I hold him open almost-round and the fury fades out of it, all at once, evening out into something blissful like kissing. 

He's gone limp; panting for breath with a mangled noise at the end of each exhale, rise and fall of his ribcage rocking against my face. I look up and he's looking down at me; something about the expression in his eyes makes me realize he thinks I, hate him, I take one hand away from him, liquid sex noise, and cup his face. It makes him scrunch his eyes closed, tight-tight, like a little kid afraid of the dark. 

"You don't have to," he says, mouthing this at me like a secret. "You can...stop..."

"But I don't want to stop." 

"...but I _want_ you to stop...." This is climbing, almost a wail, and he sounds so, frustrated.....I'm helplessly reminded of a little kid again, getting to the point of stomping a foot. I stroke his face, and I can feel that I look, gentle, and I turn my hand inside him, pushing at things I can't visualize. Gray's fucking Anatomy never told me about this heat, about this lubricated sliding maze of things that feel triple-bagged in silk and suede. I think I'm below his diaphragm. I push down and it makes him do this percolating ugly scream, knees thudding into my back again, and it makes him vomit a little. Stomach? My hand wanders to his mouth, smears away the clear fluid slicking his jaw, leaves red in its wake. I try to push up, wanting under his breastbone, wanting to feel the heartbeat I can sense in all this warm welcoming flesh to thud into my fingers, but this silksuede confounds me. Architecture-edges of bone under my hand, muffled in tissue I scratch at. I pull at him, shake him by this angle of ribcage and sternum, fingers wandering into his mouth to compare the textures. His teeth are so much more, immediate, than his ribcage. I lean up and put my tongue in his mouth, fingers stirring him again, holding his jaw to warn him not to bite me. I want that bonefriction under my nails and I scratch at all this layering between me and his breastbone and he squalls and thrashes, and I realize I'm mangling him and that isn't what I intend at all.

One last long, deep lick, and a kiss against this new vertical mouth, and my fingers slide out. I get off him, and lurch towards the door, red hands out in front of me, wandering to my own mouth, wandering along the walls to leave little Pollack marks so I can find my way back.

 

I scare myself in the bathroom mirror so badly I backpedal out until my ass hits the closet door across the hall. Heart pounding like a racehorse. 

Fuck. Wow. 

I cautiously try this shit again, bare my teeth at my reflection. Even my fucking teeth are red. I swallow, tasting keys, well water. 

Blood. 

I try really really hard and I manage to have one flicker of nausea, the only one all night. It's thin and insincere and soon over. I open the medicine cabinet thinking that one flicker was the last dying spasm of human inside me. It's so goth and so wryly funny and such a staggeringly huge, relief to have it gone. 

I pluck the empty shopping-bag liner out of the trashcan, fill it with gauze, peroxide, alcohol, styptic pencil (that one makes me laugh) tape, butterfly bandages. Tylenol, ha. Three flavors of antibiotics I quit taking once I felt better. A roll of toilet paper. A handful of hand towels. I scrub the fuck out of the trashcan and fill it with warm soapy water. 

Back down the hall with this load of supplies. He has his knees drawn up, as curled up as he can be with his arms tied out. That's a hieroglyph, too. It's too dark in here. I stumble my way to my bedside table and unload the gear. Things hit the floor. I click on the lamp out of reflex. Okay, I admit it, I have a normal bulb there too. Hey, it's for reading. Something about this warm, bright, going-to-bed domestic light is so....real...suddenly...it's a pretty boy, lying there, one of Us with wounds and wounds and wounds. He looks scared and tired and hurt. His eyeliner is perfect. Ruined. I need to remember to do that next time. His eyelashes are clumped together, wet. Still crying.

There is so much blood.

I don't even bother to look for the Tylenol. I go for the stashbox and come back with it and a clear, cold, unadulterated bottle of water. I open it in front of him so he'll know it's, new. His eyes flicker open in delayed reaction to that seal-cracking thirsty sound and his eyes follow the bottle. Tongue finds lips; finds the sticky I've left there. 

"Can't..."

"You can. I didn't puncture anything vital." Yet. Oh, honey, I should motherfucking know. 

Flash: virginity after virginity lying deeper and deeper inside him, waiting for me to unclose them. Layers like veils to rend. More naked than naked, over and over. 

He lets me hold up his head and he drinks the measured sips I give him, cheek against my knee, without struggle, eyes rolling closed in tired gratitude. He takes the pills I put in his mouth, and he seems to take a minute to arrange them but he swallows them in twos without question: a pair of Percocet and two-of-three antibiotics. The crying stops. It starts again, much later, after I've been cleaning his wounds a long, long time. 

 

I untie him. Turn off the lamp. He's limp and he doesn't want to move his arms. I find and rub the places I know being tied like that must hurt until he lets me coax his arms down into the fetal curl he wants to do. Then I spoon him. This scares him, but he's cold and also I think, lonely, and when I show no signs of imminent evil and pull the pile of blankets over us shower curtain and all. I find that sort of funny, now, that I thought I would care about the state of the bed and tangle our feet together and hold him in the dark. After a very long time he, relaxes, or at least his breathing gets longer and slower and softer, and he's...easier, under my hands. No more kinetic energy.

Maybe he's dying. I sort of hug at him to see and he mrrs at me, a lovers-in-bed noise. Sleeping. It makes me smile. 

 

I don't really sleep. All right, maybe an hour or two. Then I'm up and after the meth, trying to rifle quietly through the party debris in search of my stashbox, so as not to wake him up. He looks like an angel and I am thinking something about what it would be like to catch an one and fuck it to death. 

Today we find out, children.

First, though, I have to go shopping.

First, though, wow, I have to shower.

 

Shower. I find and put on my horrible ugly dumbass prescription glasses, which make me look like any sort of harmless...computer, geek, and a dark brown polo shirt and blue jeans and a ball cap. There. It looks asinine, which means I'll probably blend perfectly.

Meth in the bathroom. Meth in the car. A dizzying mess of a WalMart in which I buy cinnamon and salt and waterproof mascara and gardening shears and cigarettes and too much red wine. That should confuse them. Then I go back inside and buy upholstery needles, the curved ones, so good, and black silk thread and several bolts of black linen and one of black velvet and several rolls of black satin ribbon as wide the clerk could find. I pay at a different register than the first time, and leave by the garage entrance. Both receipts go; one in their parking lot as confetti and one wherever the bits landed on the freeway. 

Across town. Took me an hour to navigate to this place, fucking Jacksonville. Before I left I went through Lady Stardust's wallet, and discovered he seemed to have been carrying all or most of what they were probably paid to play there. I feel semi-guilty but it's sort of like...medical, expenses. Or funeral expenses.

I put on a black trench coat that lives in Shelley for this reason and Deathstyle-LeClaire sort of black sunglasses. 

Take off the hat. Brush my hair, checking obsessively for blood I missed. Apply eyeliner and powder, because I look like absolute shit. Deep wish for coffee.

New Age sort of headshoppy store. Four things that cost a fuck of a lot but are so fucking perfect they're worth it. Almond oil, tiny expensive bottles of patchouli and myrrh and frankincense and sandalwood and cedar and camphor and ambergris. Incense. A sticker that says MEAT IS MURDER that has nothing to do with Lady Stardust but it was funny and I wanted it. A silver ankh pendant. A copy of _The Book of the Dead_ in very prettily bound and illustrated hardcover.

Next. Hardware store, six huge-ass bags of Wet-Rid, which is not the right thing at all but will have to do. On the way out I steal several wooden skids from behind the building. Shel is so the perfect car. Throw the bastards into the back and drive like mad.

Home again, home again. Meth. Dragging the little boombox out to the shed. Meth. Power tools. Meth. No, you perverts, Lady Stardust is sleeping, and apparently my noise doesn't wake him. I checked. His pulse is strong and his breathing seems, normal. I tied his hands again and I considered tape over his mouth, but in the end it's too risky. He could choke and I might not hear him.

Spray paint. Internet. Meth. Fighting with the printer for three hours. Sprinting back to the shed with the printouts and meth and a Diet Coke and my cigarettes and an ash tray and paintbrushes and more paint all clutched together in my arms with my shirt like an apron around them. Still in the eyeliner. Ha. 

When I am finished, it's almost perfect.

Sunglasses. Dumbass hat. No trenchcoat. Flea market; and a porcelain mask, the kind that come with the Mardi Gras paint on them. Black feathers. More incense. Scarabs. 

Home again, damn it. He's awake. I bring him chicken broth and orange juice. He manages to drink both without any serious drama. He says _thank you._ He looks like he feels hung over. I bring him the bowl. Hold it for him. Give it to him once he proves himself able and retrieve the mask. I take off all the feathers and sequins and sand it and paint it flat white. Acrylic paint is your friend. I drape the shower curtain behind it and squint at his face. More contouring. 

I'm no artist, but I manage pretty well. He watches me, and I untie his arms, and he manages to sit up a little and peer over the edge of the bed to watch me painting like a madman. He's, modeling, for me, I think. When I'm finished he smiles like it flatters him and tells me it's beautiful. I give him Percocet, and three Xanax and antibiotics, and push him over on his back and watch until he's almost out again. Clean his wound. Lick my fingers.

More shopping. The kind you do from your telephone. More meth and an insane afternoon of making and cleaning and arranging and improvising and painting and squinting and printing-out and sharpening. I'm taking careful notes of what I'm doing so I can change what doesn't work. They're in my head. I'm not leaving anything to explain the real tricks behind the show. Never teach a student everything you know.  
Then, Percocet and a Xanax for me, and Percocet and several lines of X for Lady Stardust, which he snorts either because he's afraid of me or because he's had so much Percocet already. He periodically thanks me as I hand him drugs. I carry him out to the couch and we watch Troll and then Exorcist III for Jeff.  
Jeff, honey, those bitches who bitch that this one is all talk and no scare aren't smart enough to understand the talk.  
Troll is......there's the bit where Malcolm says _maybe it wasn't because you were sick, maybe it was because you were Magick....._ that I had to, leave, during. But other than that it was okay. He murmured something in a lungful of pot smoke through the end credits about loving the music. Maestro boy. It makes me want to brush his hair, and when I wander off and wander back with a brush he lets me. I'm very, very gentle.

Rum and coke. Half a Soma. That makes up a lot of lines and I patiently hold the Deathstyle cd for him while he's on the couch on a pyramid of pillows and a Pharaoh sweep of soft royalblue flannel with the white square of bandage on his chest like a blank cartouche. I take pity and do the last two for him. Let him snort water off my fingertips, and find it inexplicably unbearably sexy.

I need to be slower. I don't want to waste it. I'm going to miss this one. He has such nice manners. I've blown into the rent, at this point, because I really want to make this perfect. Not just to get better at, this, but because he deserves it. I hope he.....likes it, or something. 

I split a single hit of the LSD with him. Three more are triple-bagged on the bedside table. I spoon him in the dark and when I feel my teeth start to grow I wrap my arms around him and the crackle of his bandage, right there in the concave of his ribcage. This little square of, censored, and the hole I know is underneath it makes me understand why straight boys like, lingerie. I nudge at the tape thinking of hands sliding up thighs and I pull until I can slide just one finger underneath, and a fence of butterfly strips stops me, and I think garters and chew a laugh into his shoulder. 

He laughs, too, I swear he does, even though it doesn't make any noise. I feel it in my jaw. 

I tease with my fingernails at the oblong between two of these bow-tie shaped little vinyls, and I feel him do it again, that, laugh. 

I threaten more than I deliver for a long time, and we're in the dark with the blankets over even our heads, and it's a little like a slumber, party. I play that game much, much too long, and I'm crying a little when I disengage and go into the bathroom to get the needles. Thread. Alcohol. A second trip for scissors.

Meth. Fuck being, slower. 

I turn him over on his stomach. Tie his hands and his feet and his waist. He's only panting at first but by the time I get through making sure of how very little slack he's supposed to have it's really more like sobbing. "Can you breathe?"

It confuses him. He nods, hesitantly, like this might be a trap. I pull his hips up and push a pillow underneath. Better. I check to make sure he's not suffocating and move his hair. It's dried so soft, still Bowie and pointy and chewable but younger.....wide swimmingpool eyes looking up at me with such, hopefulness.

Meth.

I choose a smaller blade. Alcohol the fuck out of it, flame the blade mostly to watch him watch me do that. Wipe him down from the nape of his neck to his heels. The drugs would push him into moaning reverie and then he'd remember what this chemical-cool sort of petting, meant, and whimper awhile until the long long strokes and the ceiling fan and the LSD rocked him back into serenity again. Pretty boy. 

Then I pick up the blade.

I can see enough of my lines from before to continue them around in a more or less symmetrical pattern. Some places like the base of his spine I improvise, with mirrored shapes that could mean anything. I swear for at least half of this he was moving towards the blade and not away from it, and after I got myself arranged kneeling between his legs and reached under him to stroke his cock this got a lot more fucking pronounced. I drew little artistically-complicated brackets around each of his vertebrae starting at his neck and just above his waist he started to come, and it was apparently the sort of orgasm that happens twice in five years if you're lucky, the right drug, the right boy, the kind where you can't make any noise, only, shake. 

I linger, cutting, holding the knife really more like a pencil again. You can get up to so much more detail when they are so paralyzed to begin with. Make a note of that. If you're into artistry. And I roll my hand in piston-thudding rhythm so fast I'm afraid to imagine _how fast_ or _I'll lose it,_ and the knife is between us and I can't see it and he buries his face against my shoulder and chews me, biting hard enough to really, really hurt. 

It broke my heart a little when that bruise was gone.

 

I come against his thigh. I let go of the knife at some point and Hell knows where it is in the sticky lack of space between us. He kisses my arm where he's bitten me. I kiss the top of his head because it's all that I can reach.

After all the cuts are laid, I thread a needle, and start to sew.

 

It takes me till early on Day Three to finish sewing him. Partially because as I went along I began to see places that needed more cuts. Ribcage. Breastbone. Throat. I switch from forceps that don't fucking work to needlenose pliers that do, pulling up each quarter-inch of skin, laying careful stitches through the cut in black silk thread. Sometimes the frictiony pull-through makes him scream harder than the initial double-puncture. 

I have to stop twice to fuck him. The heartfelt tears are much too much. I can't sew when my dick is so hard I can't think. 

Then I clean him, and mix oils in a silver dish and anoint him from scalp to sole, wounds and all. I rub ocher-red cinnamon into the little stitched-closed lines, and I bind him in strips of black bandage I cut, sealing the ends with sewing and wax because I have no fucking clue what the Egyptians used. I do his fingers and his toes and his hands and feet and arms and legs up to the knee, and his neck. 

I need the rest of him, still open. 

At exactly four pm tomorrow it will be midnight in Egypt.

 

I gave him most of the rest of the acid at about one-thirty. I eat a hit and a half myself, and put I forget how many in his mouth. I forget how many I bought. I give him glass after glass of red wine, while I lazy half-peel off his test bandages, and toy with licking his wounds and poking cocaine into them with a fingernail. I haul him back to the couch and leave him to the LSD gods for a few minutes and find some Coil that works with the mood and light dozens of candles, carrying them into the bedroom from all over the house. I add another few pieces to the stack of wood holding up the upper end of the headboard. It just wasn't enough tilt last time, and this time there's going to be a lot more fluid.

Then I carry Lady Stardust back to bed. 

He's booted in Osiris-black bandages up to his thighs; gloved in them up to his shoulders, collared in them from chin to Adam's apple. I tie him on his back, arms out but legs together, black rope at wrists and ankles, shoulders and knees and thighs. 

I need him to be very, very still. 

This is almost the end and it has to be perfect. 

I brush his teeth for him. It makes him cry again. I repaint his makeup last. He's conscious but not really, responsive, and I have to hold his face in certain postures with my fingertips. Too much eyeshadow, pointed black lipstick, both waterproof, with the line from the center of his bottom lip down in a straight line to the bandages. 

Everything is closed, covered, all but that one beautiful wound right where the soft place starts below the sternum. That one is held by butterfly tapes under scrupulously clean gauze that's the only white thing in the room. 

I've given him as many painkillers as I dare. I'm very fucking careful with my dosage. Do not try at home unless you are willing to lose your subject. I don't think he knows where he is, really. I'm hoping the LSD makes this into something transcendental for him and not....hmm.....unalleviated, nightmare-ish. Something beautiful. He deserves that. 

I've laid out blades on black velvet. Every X-acto in the house. Gardening shears. Nail scissors. The thread and the needle. Everything less aesthetically pleasing than that that I need is out of sight under the bed. I kiss him for a long time, and it soothes him, lures him into the dream until he's sort of crooning under his breath, limp with chemical bliss. I straddle his hips for the last time and coax up an edge of the butterfly tape and p e e l. 

It's like drawing a curtain aside. 

I've set a blade back in this cut a dozen times over the last day and a half. It made me think of dryhumping someone every fucking time. Now it makes me think of a, tongue, or a paintbrush again, and I draw him open, open, open. I deepen it twice, feeling along with a fingertip until that spreading sense of falling in knuckle-deep runs in a wide red seam from midchest to almost his waist. 

Here I'm stuck for a second. For direction, ha, not literally. I think the Egyptians just kind of wandered to one side so I choose left and cut in a careful crescent around his navel, and then down again through flesh that drags differently at the knife, until the edge of where he's only just starting to have the faintest pubic-hair stubble. 

The blood spreads in gravity wings, in ribcage hollows and in lengthening points on the shower curtain. He's doing some set of spasms and he throws his chest up when I lift the blade, very Exorcist. I'm making more noise than he is. The new curve draws bloodlines up to branch at his collar, settle in the hollow of his throat. Now it's Fun Boy I'm thinking of. Only this crow has two heads. For a second I know what this hieroglyph means but then I lose it in the smell. I lean forward without thinking, fingers spreading in, and everything is a wet mess but I don't feel any new openings, only that soft space kissing at my hands. I put my tongue in at the bottom and l i c k and the length of that stroke reduces me to helpless groaning sorts of snarls. 

If there's a Zen, this space is it. This is the....ego loss, all the psychedelic gurus talk about. There's no me, anymore, only a set of overwhelmingly delicious stimuli; there's no real and no event and nothing that thought could really, quantify. There is no past, no present, no future to link or correlate. The only thing that exists is the space where we're intersecting. This is the only thing there has ever been. 

I love him; oh I do. I think I'd have to love somebody at least a little to do, this. 

Did I really think it was better when I didn't? Did I think I'd be able to help it? 

He's screaming. He seems very far away. I suppose the acid has taken us each away from the world, and in different directions. He doesn't sound, entirely, uh, against this, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you just what in the fuck makes me think that. He's not able to struggle very well or do anything very loudly, but I can feel this try at it...sloshing him, around my fingers. And I'm tired of careful and I want him open and I start low, and stir the blade back into the wound alongside my hand, find the sliding surface that blocks me and draw a long shallow line. 

There's that sense of a...pressure-change, that I remember from the first real cut, and here's the heat I'd read about and I don't expect it to be quite so fucking, tangible. It's like having someone exhale against you. Heater-warm. The LSD has the courtesy to give me a lot of reverb on it and I twitch forgetting the knife, up to my palms in bliss, in a new place that makes me think of those strange fleshy plants in deep-sea films. Books don't do it justice, even the ones with the full color plates. And I think you kids expect a nice Mr. Body sort of a, stack. Pieces that click neatly into one another like a spatial puzzle. So did I. I thought this would be on top of that and so forth, but it's all...meat. Like petting a flock of...birds... 

I press, and my hand slides in and I have a flickerthought of a devouring carnivorous plant and it's more delicious than horrifying. We'll see who eats who. I find something that I have to sort of burrow with a fingertip to make out that makes me think of...suspension bridges.....cables.....and he thuds against the restraints suddenly and I have telepathy and I feel him being stunned that his plan to, grab my wrist, hasn't worked. 

Will never work again. 

If I could push my hand in farther I could hook my fingers behind, this....then I realize that he can feel me doing this and I swarm up beside him to watch his eyes while I do it, trailing my fingers up through him like he's the ocean.

I can feel him starting to fail already...nothing I could pinpoint, just the sense of a light, dimming. Brownouts here and there in the lines. He's quite aware of me, though his eyes have a fractured kind of revelatory gleam in them that makes me wonder how he sees me. How he sees any of this. Whether he thinks he'll wake up. Where he'll wake up. 

I want to open his ribcage, but I don't want him ruined, to that degree. I try to spread him with my hands because I don't want to cut flaps and I leave blood on the dresser and the carpet leaning over to retrieve things. Leather thongs, laces I sacrificed from dress shoes, gripping panic that I'm doing this wrong and I can't get a do-over if I fuck it up. 

Cupping his stomach, teasing out the limits of this shape. It's amazingly smooth in my hands, and struggles by itself, still processing alcohol, ignorant of the fact that it's become obsolete. The esophagus at the top feels a lot like vacuum-cleaner cord wrapped in velvet, sort of ribbed and resistant. I can't get to all of it, just an inch or three, and then I hit the diaphragm, this stubborn elastic-vinyl kind of wall that I know is what's left of what lets Lady Stardust breathe. I wrap my fingers around it; pull down in an absurdly handjob-like motion, hitting these tight circles in moist pothole thumps, until I a soft place where the flesh of him begins to spread into his actual stomach. This is where I must tie him off. Inevitable pictures in my head of umbilical cords plague me. 

A push and a pull, the messy working of leather cord around it, a tie that leaves little wings of droplets zinging off the string. The pulling makes him scream, shifting everything around my hands in frantic synch, and I realize again and again that I am wrist-deep in the machinery of this boy. 

I tie a thong between the esophagus and the stomach, and after he stops coughing and gagging and shaking. I took my hands out of his wound and, held him, after, and you can fucking believe me or not....I reach back in and I push my fingers up his ass until I can feel them, inside him, masked by layers of that veil-tissue. Some of the books I've read insist that if something is swallowed it's not "really" inside the body at all........it's inside the self-contained alimentary column and that's all. 

I don't agree, and I don't like the degree of separation that implies. If you swallowed it into realms that could never see the sunlight, it's inside you, so fuck you.

I tie the thong till I feel it close around my fingers, and draw them out and tug it down and tie it as close to the outside of his body as I can manage.

Then the scissors, and the cutting.

It doesn't take long. 

I think he realizes what I'm cutting. That's why he makes such noise, all during, and for a long time after. He's looking right at me. This is the last eye contact we have. He watches me lift his insides out, and closes his eyes. 

Double handful, though it isn't heavy and it feels like a water balloon, which I'm not fond of. Into a waiting jar. Then there's an endless sliding interlude of moist noise and wet impact and I keep thinking of a magician pulling knotted scarves out of a sleeve, of trying to straighten tangled yarn. He screams when I find the sources of this inside him, where things connect that I have to tie off with black thread and take scissors to. I've given up thinking of any diagrams; I no longer have names in my head for the places I'm touching. 

His liver is heavy. It's fingernail-polish shiny. It's the color of oxblood boots. 

He's becoming more and more hollow. 

 

I forget which jar-lid goes with which organs and I have to look it up. Blood on my keyboard, mouse, cigarettes. I'm going to have to clean every inch of this house when I'm finished cleaning this boy. The same thing happens with any art project I'm in the middle of; all kinds of unforeseen obstacles that lead to improvisation...and messes...

I find varying opinions on what goes where. I even find a varying opinion on what goes at all, except that nobody wavers in their certainty the heart stays where it is. Exactly. I'm trying to remember if I found anything that looked like a gall bladder. I know I'm supposed to take out the brain, but I'm not interested. And I don't want to risk that beautiful face. I give up. Osiris will understand.

I fill the jars to the top with desiccant; now they're pristine and heavy without any liquid-slosh. Seal the lids on with wax. 

Sit on the couch and burn incense and smoke. Everything I put near my face tastes of slaughterhouse and clove. My mouth is kiss bruised. I don't think anyone ever kissed me long enough to bruise my lips. I cry a little because he's gone, because I'm scared, because I can feel and hear and smell and taste how quiet the house is, and because I'm why.

Lady Stardust is lying on my bed, with the shower curtain under him, shiny black with shinier redblack here and there. His wounds are bloodless and smooth, and his face is gorgeous, peaceful. He's powder-white. He smells like Egypt. 

I kiss him with my bruised mouth, stroke his Osiris-folded arms. I try to exhale into him, to share the Lucifer kiss, but it's like the machinery inside him is locked still, and I can't exhale hard enough to fill his lungs. I hope it blesses him anyway. 

I start at his toes, wrapping him into the last hieroglyph. I remember the tucked-in baubles, and I give him a pewter pentagram, a polished piece of lapis lazuli, an onyx arrowhead, a Deathstyle ticket stub, a full neatly-rolled joint, here and there wound in his bandages. The police will have seizures trying to decode this. Morons. 

I'm no priest, but I gathered what they gave were tiny little....holy...objects. So that was what I gave. I hope he liked them; I liked him. He was lovely, and yes, I do fucking miss him. Believe what you like. Those who matter will know the truth. 

At the last minute I remember The Book of the Dead. I take off the ugly paper dust jacket; underneath it is perfect, black cloth with silver stamping. I put it under his folded hands. That'll have to do. I can't paint well enough to put it all over the coffin, and I don't have the time.

The deathmask is last; I tie it on with a loop of black ribbon and when I'm finished I see what I've made as I suppose none of you will ever see it. The last hieroglyph before that line around it, to end-name, hold the sigils trapped. 

 

El Camino. One Lady Stardust/Osiris sculpture, wood, ceramic, paint, linen, inhumanly lovely remains. One wooden box with four jars nestled inside it wound in last-minute red scrap velvet. They were clattering when I carried them. 

One stop for bolt cutters. One stop somewhere else for a padlock. Driving north and west in no particular direction. The Sisters of Mercy's Vision Thing is unlistenable for me now because I discovered that was the only tape I had in the car. Yeah, you're right, that IS the one with the Egyptian-eye cover. Isn't it romantic.

 

After one fill-up and about twelve times through the tape I drove into the moment I was looking for; the windows down and the cool damp night-ocean-sacred sense that is so, necessary, sometimes. Skein after skein of ribbondark road and lightless houses and wide sweep of sky. I think I might be in Georgia. Whatever. I know where to turn without knowing how I know and I'm going a reasonable thirty-five or so in this tiny Southern town and I turn off the headlights long before I stop at the gate. I leave her running. I get out and cut the padlock off and push them open and drive in and get out and push them closed again, apply the new padlock with the key still neatly looped through it. It's not for, security, exactly-it's for politeness. 

Graves stretch out in sedate aisles along us, and it's quiet and solemn and makes me think of church-pews and the uncanny rows of perfectly-straight planted trees you pass along highways. Shelley feels, awed. I roll her at an almost-idling purr up to the first stone building. I have to three-point turn her and it's more scary than I expect because I'm tired and even though I know I'm nowhere near any graves I'm terrified I'll hit somebody's tombstone. This is their place and not mine; I'm here on business, and it's important I don't.....disturb the peace. 

This is a holy place. That's why I'm putting him here. 

 

Getting him out is not difficult; he's heavy, and he thumps, but I've backed all the fucking way up to the doorway-there's no door, just an arch. Inside the mauseoleum it's a double wall neatly laid with plaques, and a wide open space at the end. That's where he goes. I push him there and find that dear Lord, I do have a tiny brush and dustpan in my car that I have never ever used. I tidy up our traces until it looks like he materialized there. Good. Put the small box on top of the large one. They're opaque black with only the smallest of sigils running in exhausted last-minute silver in a thin thin border. Stick the few stubs of candle I remembered here and there, and light them. Shove incense into the crack between box and lid and light stick after stick till it smells like it's supposed to, like a, temple. 

It'll have to do.

Sometimes I wish I had a picture and sometimes I'm glad the only pictures of it are in my head. Did I tell you that already?

I hope the candles burn long enough to let him have light until sunrise. 

 

I drive and drive and I'm lost as fuck, and I spend thirty of the fifty-five dollars I have on an awful hotel room and five of the fifteen remaining of that on a bottle of horrible red wine. I lie in bed and stare at the television with the sound too far down to hear it. Cry. It's so fucking quiet in here. There's blood under my fingernails I missed. I keep cleaning them with my teeth and no matter how long I do it I can still taste him.

I'm still trying to grasp that he's gone. It seems like a play were in or sex that we had that was mindnumbingly elementally perfect; I keep turning to say to him "I was really fucking happy about how the mask came out; and your nail polish, did you-" And of course, the answer is no. He didn't. Or if he did, he sure as fuck can't get stoned with me and run his mouth about it now. Because he's gone. 

I fall asleep, TV painting the room blue.

 

The police find him. There are a few confused blurbs. They lie about bits of it and seem to think I got some of it from some comic book. I have no idea what they're talking about. Nobody arrests London After Midnight and Ressler is not consulted. 

Nobody looks at me twice.


	4. Psychomotor Agitation--Fade (rough cut)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our favorite serial killer investigates his interest in psychology, experiments with necromancy, and takes in some culture.

**HOMNIVOROUS**

 

He’s willowy-tall. His hair is synthetic-shiny crimson-on-black, just a little too long for him somehow, almost to the middle of his back. He’s wearing extremely red vinyl pants, huge bugeyed sunglasses, too much dark red lipstick. A coat they must’ve killed a lot of Muppets to make over a tshirt that says MEAT IS MURDER. I sincerely doubt he digs that slogan for the reasons I dig it. 

This creature is waving a zine at me and yelling something that ends with _Erik?_

Fuck.

I confess it; I still submit stories. I spend weeks looking shit up and formatting this carefully professional little package and sending it away to agents or editors or publishing houses or contests, and after I manage one of these big fucking sends I get wasted and send a bunch of shit to a bunch of weird zines and tiny little print-houses. A lot of them get accepted, usually for no pay, and usually for online-only print, which is about as useful as putting it on a BBS. Which is, not at all, except that a few dozen people will read it. I always publish under some variant of the same pseudonym, so I don’t know how he knows that I’m Erik. “What?”

“..did you write this?” He points across the club at a behemoth with one of those dumbass bridge-of-the-nose piercings, sitting in the center of a tornado of cigar smoke. He waves a biker-sized hand at me. “That’s Mack, that’s the editor.”

I squint at this Jabba again. That IS the editor of some Florida gothhorror thing I’ve probably been harassing. I remember the idiotic piercing. Great. You fucking genius. There are _reasons_ I post my goregasm sci-fi under a pseudonym in a nothing zine. Besides the fact that nothing mainstream will touch it.

It’s too much information for anyone to have about me. It’s _private._

“What is it?” 

“It’s fucking amazing,” he shouts at me, over the Nitzer Ebb.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. It’s a _fan._

He’s shouting over the music that whatever piece is in the magazine he’s got blew his mind. I get it away from him and ask him how vegan he is to distract him while I page through it in the ridiculous dance-floor light. Ah. Here it is. Allow me to pause while I fail to find a better way to say that my heart sank or my balls shrank. 

It would be THAT one. 

You’re never gonna find this magazine, and I really cannot convey how embarrassing this is to you without you reading the thing. THIS is what this pretty glamgoth boy has chased me down to tell me he finds amazing:

_incense and thalidomide_  
i wanted to do this for years. i found a boy, finally  
who was suicidal due to a functioning intellect, and he  
let me fuck him up the ass while i made  
a four and ¾ inch incision in his lower abdomen  
and worked my hand inside until i was holding my own dick  
he came before he died. i didn't. by the time i stopped  
he was starting to get cold.  
when the police told his mother how they found him,  
she fainted, fell, and broke her hip. 

_let's figure out what the rings of saturn would look like from the surface_  
i suspect they're like an aurora borealis on acid  
glitter wild with ice crystals and strange frozen chemicals  
and the sun in the sky would be green and about the size of a marble.  
and the horizon would be so big your heart would break  
not like here when everything looks 

_okay, fake_

_(the next day i still had blood and shit under my fingernails_  
i told everyone i'd been painting and they smiled and nodded  
like their heads were on springs, thinking: if he paints for fun  
he must be a queer or something) 

_and i went to park street with my sunglasses on_  
and some fuck slammed his shoulder into my shoulder on purpose  
he was one of those in tommy hilfiger with a stupid haircut  
and i only had to kick him once  
because everyone knows  
you just have to wear steel toes 

_(they had his mother on TV in a wheelchair_  
crying and talking about him being with Jesus now  
i was watching naked in the dark, drinking a coke, smoking a clove  
i laughed at her because she's a fatass lying bitch  
and she didn't hear her "christian" son sobbing "oh, yes, please"  
when i put two fingers in the wound in his stomach as foreplay and moved them in and out  
and then leaned over and did the same thing with my tongue in his mouth  
his dick was hard against my leg and when i leaned back to breathe  
and look him in the eye all he would say was "harder") 

_his funeral is tomorrow. i think maybe i'll go and shoot some people._  
shit. i don't have my gun anymore. and the waiting period is three goddamned days.  
i guess i could drop acid and go anyway. he would have wanted me there.  
but if i have to see his mom i'll start laughing. i shouldn't go. 

_so i went to a catholic church instead, where they still had confessionals_  
and i told the poor bastard priest everything  
and when i said that my hand sliding in made  
a sound like squishing jello around in your mouth, he  
started crying and saying "oh, jesus. oh, jesus."  
and that was so much like what the boy had said that  
i couldn't stop laughing, it got so bad that my knees were weak  
and i couldn't see where i was going, and i almost fell as i was leaving 

_i went to taco bell from the church and lied and said they fucked up my last order_  
i got a shitload of free food and drove to the beach at ninety  
i didn't eat much. i threw the rest out the window of my car  
did some coke. drove in circles. did a little crying 

_it'll never be like that again, not with someone i have to force_  
it won't be art if it isn't consensual and interactive. it makes me mad mad crazy scared  
i miss him. it was better when he was here.  
i can't even smell him on my hands anymore, and it's only been two days.  
i took his necklace. it's junk, a pewter anarchy symbol on a black string  
but i'm afraid to wear it because the cops are everywhere 

_let's speculate about the fate of america_  
this place is ripe for a predator like me, everyone is slow  
and complacent. i could kill one a week for the rest of my life  
and never get caught. but that wouldn't be the same. 

_i think this place is like when a star becomes a red giant_  
it's pretty, but it's diseased, and it's going to fall in on itself  
and nobody will be here to pick up the pieces. 

_(i made a big bowl of black cherry jello and left it in the  
confessional. i'm going to try to give that poor bastard a nervous breakdown.)_

 

Amazing. Uh huh. Cute, innit? And yet so, pornographic, and wrong. 

I was clearly listening to too much Skinny Puppy at the time. I have no idea what I was thinking with the gun business; I hate any long-distance, intimacy-free murder. Maybe that plus the boots was because of too much _American History X_ for the sake of the Edward Furlong. Still in all pretty happy with this piece. Not quite a poem, not quite a short story, not quite a joke. As you can imagine my parents are overflowing with pride at my literary career. 

(They’ve never seen it. Or read anything of mine since seventh grade or so.)

It isn’t that it’s _bad._

It’s that it’s....classified, and not a good idea for anyone to know it was written by _me._

Damn it. 

For one thing, it’s very thinly disguised. Those of you who were guessing Jamie, you get a star. I was trying to get that motherfucking frustration out of my system. I’m thinking I failed.

You’d think that horror or dark fantasy or splatterporn or guro or whatever the fuck they’re calling it this week would be pretty accepted in this of all subcultures. But you’d be wrong. Oh, you’ll find more people with Hellraiser shirts and Fulci and all the King ever written, sure, but there are all kinds of subrules about tone, about taking X or Y “too” seriously. Maybe because of the usually utterly unjustified rumours about people in black-and bullshit like what happened to the West Memphis Three. 

Damien, you beautiful boy. I’m so sorry. For all three of you.

I get a lot of blunt and hostile anger about how _sympathetic_ I make my killers and how sexual I make the violence. Like people in the scene are afraid I’ll bring more static down on us all. 

All right, they have a point in my case, ha. 

I get one of two reactions when I show someone in person anything I’ve written in the last ten years. 

The first is vacant “This is so good!” That’s mostly pure surprise that anyone would write so many pages of ANYTHING without getting a grade. 

The second is “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

It’s much safer and less embarassing to print it somewhere. And I get emails about it, some gleeful, some to tell me that it was hysterically funny, a couple just in case I had missed all previous memos re: me burning in Hell. I get told I hate smaller, younger versions of myself because I don’t like my own queerness (uh, no) that I’m viciously jealous of beautiful boys becasse I’m probably fat and hideous (underweight, as always. Hideous is up to you.) that I’m insane because of my drug-use (the drugs are not to blame) in desperate need of Jesus (ha).

That much hate for someone they think is just _writing_ this stuff. 

I wanted to ask them what made me think these things when I was pre-fucking kindergarten. I wanted to tell them how soft and strange and satisfyingly heavy a liver is, how fucking warm, how it seems to have a streak of impudence and a wellspring of tricks to slither out of your hands. Just to laugh at the incoherent screaming gibberish they’d write back. But I know better than to tell the Enemy anything. I learned that much in your schools, if little else.

There’s this Japanese guy, Sagawa, who ate a woman in France, got out of prison, and somehow got away with writing a book about it. He’s a celebrity now. 

I don’t think I’d want to be famous, for something more private than sex. 

I think I understand why I get anonymous fan mail. and a shitload of righteous indignation in public. It’s as dangerous for a reader to _enjoy_ this. It’s dangerous for me to confess to having it inside my head by writing it down. I kept doing it because I liked the idea that maybe some of my stories were getting kids like me through bullshit like my life. Never mind. 

And here’s one of them now. This pretty twink that is looking at me..oh, maybe the way I'd look at Clive Barker if I ever met him. Not quite the Nathaniel and Lucifer thing, ha, but almost in the backstage-by-the-buses range. 

I’m tempted. 

Having one of those hypothetical kids sitting in front of me to tell me how much he drooling adores this piece of evil filth is extremely, uh, hot. No, wait. Nervewracking.

It’s so quiet in my house with nobody there but me.

He’s explaining with what looks a lot like _pride_ that yes, he’s really a vegan. “No meat products, period. Morally against unneccessary suffering.”

I smile. I wonder how he defines unnecessary. “I’m immorally in favor of all kinds of suffering. “ 

He smiles and nods. I suppose he’s misheard me, or thinks he has. 

 

“I’m Fade.”

I make him repeat it. I’m hearing Feyd which is a terrible omen, but I make him spell it. I raise one shoulder in my all-leather trenchcoat and order another drink. He pays for it. 

 

We sit in the back in the weird little espresso bar. It’s much too well lit and too quiet, but the good news is that means it’s pretty empty. Fade takes off his sunglasses and he’s prettier than I thought, but disconcertingly, doll-like, and not in a good way. He’s not old enough to drink, says the stamp on his hand. Aw. He’s wearing too much makeup, fake lashes heavy with black mascara, every bit of it liquid-liner precise. There’s not a single line anywhere on his face. Not a gleam, not a pore. He’s like, plastic. 

Somehow he isn’t my type, really. He’s passably within my parameters, and he is lovely, but… on him the goth looks like a costume. A disguise. Like he had a personal shopper research and buy him a goth wardrobe. He’s just got the haircut and makeup and clothes favored by my type. He's not flawed enough. He doesn't look like he's ever been hurt, or had to try really hard at anything, or work a fucking job while going to school, or miss sleep, or live off of fucking ramen noodles. 

He looks _healthy._

It's revolting. It’s also fascinating. I could make him look unhealthy. He needs damage, scars, hunger, fear, worry. That would improve him. He has great cheekbones, though they’d become stellar if he were forced to lose twenty pounds. If I worked on him a while, maybe. Just maybe. 

"Do you still write the same, kind of thing?"

Uh. “What kind of thing?”

"You know." He can’t say it. He winces and mouths, _murders._

Interesting. I wonder if I made him say blow job would he blush and fidget the same way. My brain almost draws a psychological conclusion from this, but I let it go. 

I should’ve gotten a drink I liked, if I was going to use it to stall replies. I genuinely hate espresso. It tastes like when you leave a coffeepot on too long. “The idea, from that one, is becoming so big it’s almost a Novel...” I shrug.

“It’s about the same character?”

Or lack thereof. “It’s about a serial killer, yeah.”

I can’t help but watch for the eye dilation. There it is. Swish like the iris of a camera’s lens. Nine times out of ten that I look for that, I find it. It’s a physiological response to desire that is pretty impossible to fake or repress. His eyes are weird. No color of their own. They’re cooldark now, from his hair and his coat. If you could look at them say, in your palm, they’d be, clear...

“See, I read it as almost...satire...like _A Modest Proposal_ thing. But you’re so in the headspace that it...” He won’t look straight at me. I don’t think he ever has. “...just, wow. Spooky. You cost me sleep.” Grin. His teeth are politician perfect. And he’s well-read, though utterly wrong about his little English Lit conclusion.

“It isn’t satire.”

“Well, no, not exactly, but exaggerated for the sake of, social commentary.”

I’m starting to do some grin myself, but it’s nothing like his. I wonder if he realises how profoundly he’s just insulted me. “I do _nothing_ for the sake of society.” 

He boggles at me as though this were in Swahili. “But in order to convey--“

“An experience. To tell a story.” Yes, I know, that’s half lie. Shut up. 

“But then...” That tinge of blush, that lets me know what folder he’s in. _Murders. Say it, pretty boy._ “Why would you choose a story about, that?”

I snort. I can’t help it. “Why does Grisham write about boring-ass lawyers? Why does King write about Maine?” Shrug. I resist the urge to throw down _you write what you know._

He nods, a little unhappily, as if I’ve gotten the point but missed the soul of his argument. Hmm. I adjust my crosshairs the tiniest bit due left. It isn’t me who’s missed the point, doll. “Why do you _read_ about, that?” I smirk at him. “About meat and murder, I mean.”

More blush. Uh huh. 

Let’s go for a walk.

 

Fade is sitting in the passenger seat of my car. I reach over and push my fingers in his mouth, hold his tongue, run my fingertip under it. It’s amazingly soft, so utterly lubricated. So this is what makes the mercury move in a glass thermometer. 

The roof of his mouth is different from the other tissue, almost scratchy, not as wet. It feels like there's a...backbone, underneath it. I push back to his soft palate and he gags, and I feel the flesh there just...convulse. I can't take that and I lean over and kiss him, except that it's messy, because my fingers are still in his mouth. 

I want to bite him but my fingers are making it difficult. I move down to his neck, and do something with suction over his underdone Adam’s apple, with my teeth not-quite-closed. He's making this too-dramatic gasping noise, at irregular intervals. He loves it. 

I lean back to see how this looks. The only things about Fade really that make him look like David even a little are his hair and his mouth. His hair is too long, but it falls at approximately the same angle. His mouth isn’t too far off, but he’s doing his lipstick too carefully. 

I take my fingers out of his mouth, wipe the spit and most of the lipstick off his face with the palm of my hand. I reach into the floor by his feet, pick up his little treasure-chest bag. "I want to do your makeup over. “ I turn the almost-useless dome light on.

Okay, David’s mouth: obscene, too much dark lipstick, painted on to make his mouth full and savage and so inherently sexy on such a deep Freudian level that it was practically impossible to talk to him. I hesitate over the motherfucking line for a long time. It feels, disrespectful. Whatever. Fuck it, defiant, horny, some combination that makes me just give up. Let this idiot fuck himself up. Look, bitch, you knew I was a snake.

One line from the middle of his bottom lip down onto his neck. Mouth to throat. It improves him. Black Chanel eyeliner and maroon Chanel lipstick. A department store goth. 

I cram the makeup back into his box and close it messily and push it back into the floor. This time I bite him harder and push my hands under his shirt. His skin is like a miracle, long and tense and feverwarm. There's that thermometer thing again. Tiny nipples that stay impossibly-soft for a long time before they tighten under my fingertips. I bite him too hard. Startled ugly luscious noise. To stop myself I have to _tear_ myself away from him. I slam into my half-open door and get out of the car, press my face and my chest against her hood, like a hug. 

I listen to her engine making occasional ticks, and Fade finally figures out how to open his door and he falls/climbs out and closes it, nowhere near hard enough to actually close that door. With Shel, it's a clank, not a click, that gets shit done. You don't operate this car. You _drive_ it.

I never had to tell David that. He just knew. I never had to redo his makeup. It was perfect already.

Fade puts his hands on my shoulders, and says, "You didn't have to stop."

"Of course I had to stop."

"I didn’t want you to.”

I get it then, and I push myself back and away from him and the car, making some noise. "That's what this is? You think I was going to fuck you?"

He stares. "Well, you--"

"You're positive." Something in my voice, or my eyes, or the way my hands are, raised, makes Fade begin to understand what I mean. I watch the edge of this idea move over his face. 

"That's not what that was. Just get in the car."

He does. He’s slow and clumsy, but he gets to his door and gets in, sniffling. His mouth is in this scared shape, and with all that lipstick it's just...so...bad. 

I have to stop. I shouldn't look. I shouldn't have painted him like that. 

I wait till he’s settled and get in myself. I slide the face of the stereo around. It makes me see David doing that, and it hurts me inside. It still doesn't fit in the socket, but now it's cracked, so sometimes the whole fucking thing slides right into the dash and I have to pull it out with a coathanger. I get it aligned with the slot for the tape and put in Rammstein and then Millineum Falcon the car out of the parking lot. 

I think Fade is waiting for me to apologize. After a while he figures out I'm not going to. "Where are we going?"

"Your place.”

**MASQUERADE**

Fade’s house is in a manicuredlawn neighborhood you get to by turning past a huge brick gateway with an illuminated sign I don’t bother to read. I feel a tiny bit conspicuous in my ancient blazing green El Camino. We don’t pass another car. Empty roads. It’s way past yuppie bedtime. 

His house is the kind where upwardly-mobile young graduate students raise two point five kids. There’s a two car garage, containing one miniscule old but immaculate black Porsche. Shelley could eat it in two bites. I feel a little like I’m pulling into the Batcave, and I’m starting to worry we’re about to wake up Mom and Dad.

Fade smirks at my increasingly worried whispers about grownups. “No, I’m alone. My parents moved to Ponte Vedra. I keep the place while I go to school. What are you so paranoid about?” 

I’m paranoid of some PTA mom calling the COPS, you idiot, since I have at least a joint and probably two knives on me and, oh yeah. The whole trail of bodies thing. 

I don’t trust this one at all. No instincts whatsoever. Whatever he is, he’s not, one of Us. Not at all.

 

The house is bizarre, like he just slapped some Cure and Smiths and Velvet Underground posters up and got a huge stereo that doesn’t match the living room. It’s impeccably, revoltingly tastefully decorated underneath his little surface changes. Thick off-white carpeting, black sheets over taupe leather couches, black and red candles, black mosquito netting over all the lamps. Dumb, I tell you. Cute, but dumb.

He peels off that massive coat, drops it with the sunglasses on top over the back of a chair. Underneath all that he’s as narrow as I’d imagined, too tall for his own good. I cover his coat with my leather one. He disappears into the gleaming kitchen, waving at me to make myself at home. Why not. 

I tomcat through the house pretending to look for the bathroom. Everything is so _neat_. All the right little tables in all the right little nooks. Plastic plants, for fuck’s sake.

He seems to have taken over the master bedroom. There's a huge waveless waterbed, and a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, and the ceiling is like fourteen feet high. It's crazy. Another stereo system in here, too, and a massive television with five different game systems lurking at the foot of it in an octopus tangle. There are dark red sheets on the bed, a massive framed poster of Robert DeNiro smoking a cigarette. Everything else is still champagne-colored, catalogue flawless. The carpet is eggshell white, so thick I can literally bury my hand in it. I'd fucking like to set it on fire. Most of the places where I grew up the carpet was dirt-colored and so filthy and worn in places till it was disgustingly _smooth_ like a patch of tar or something. And it was so dirty that walking on it barefoot made your feet brown. 

Nobody needs carpet like this. This is nicer than what some people have for a _bed._

I back out, and I realize I’m consciously trying not to brush against anything. I feel like my inherent filth will leave trailer-trash on all this pastel array of too much money. Or that I’ll break something I can’t afford to replace. Or that security will spot me and escort me out for reasons they don’t explain that I don’t need explained. The reek of grownups and corporati is still all over everything. I don’t like this house at all. 

Hallway. A picture of Fade, framed, wearing a dark red dress shirt and with maybe just mascara on, pre-red streaks, grinning bookended by two expensive people as beige as this house. A second frame balancing that one, a collage of pictures; here’s Fade at about seventeen, still working out the goth thing, with caramel-colored hair and a Ministry t-shirt, rolling his eyes in the middle of a crowd of the sort of girls that would be preppy if they didn’t have a streak of the drama-club hippie about them. Here’s his senior picture, aw, though to his credit his hair was black by then. He looks a lot like Jamie without makeup. Creepy.

Here’s what used to be Fade’s bathroom till he was handed this house; it’s still overflowing with little designer boxes and baskets filled with makeup that I bet he doesn’t use anymore. Everything is black or teal or a flame color, and there’s a dusty little dish of the kind of soaps you’re not supposed to use on the back of the toilet. 

Last door left, and here’s the boy of the hour’s childhood room. It still keeps jarring my eye how all the furniture _matches,_ or at least looks, deliberate. The walls are medium blue, artfully scattered with posters; a chart of endangered species, a map of the solar system, a little collage out of which I pick up buffalo and mustang, cheetah and polar bear and manatee. 

A corkboard overflowing with PETA pamphlets, postcards of big-eyed cute animals, a newspaper clipping about a meat packing plant shut down for, oh, who cares. Fade again in highschool, drama club (bingo) and yearbook (aw, a dork). His graduation tassel. I make a quiet little hairball noise to myself, smirking. Fortune cookie strips sharing pushpins with horoscopes from old magazines.

There are two framed vintage movie posters over the double bed; Dracula and Night of the Living Dead. The bed is blue-and-gray, drowning in comforters and covered pillows. It has that flawlessly-made-but-abandoned look of a bed that nobody sleeps in. I peek under. A keyboard. For music, I mean, not for a computer. Nothing else, not even dust. 

There are toys. The twelve-inch Pinhead figure, on its own little wallmounted shelf beside a painstakingly assembled Hellraiser-box model. A Rancor menacing a small plastic tiger on top of the large television. A little row of stuffed endangered-species again, along the windowsill under the polished-wood blinds. 

Guarding each shelf of a shiny minimalist floor-to-ceiling bookcase are McFarlane’s Tortured Soul figures, the too cartoony Dahmer action figure, the amusingly perfect Gein. Behind these plastic murderers there are psychology and sociology textbooks, a history of crime and punishment and a gleaming row of true-crime. Under this a row or two of paperbacks from various white-light types, though I admit I approve of Leary and Hartmann. A Bible. Not particularly worn and upholstered in dust. Good. Photo albums. Four highschool yearbooks.

And here, oh my brothers and sisters, on the bottom, are the real books. The serial killer trashbooks, for some Ann fucking Rule, and that cunt Ressler and that laughable little puffed-shirt Moss get to go on the second shelf from the top. Down here in the back of the bus are Clive Barker and King and that hack Dean Koontz, well-loved paperbacks of the semi-horror that kiddies read in middleschool snuggled up beside Anne Rice. Poppy Z. Brite. Even Dennis Cooper, and I thought nobody had ever heard of him but me. 

Hmmm. 

All this horror hidden down here like pornography. The books on the shelf just above are oversized and some of these crammed in along the top of the true-crime, though still neatly, so that the bottom shelf is more or less invisible. 

That machine in my head that lets me see around other people’s thoughts? It still works. I haven’t pulled it out of the garage in a while, but the engine still runs like a charm.

“Erik?”

Fade is behind me, holding two cocktail glasses. “Sorry.” I take one of them from him, and he shrugs. I wasn’t quite visibly snooping, just, standing in the middle of the room. “I like your house.” Lame. I know. 

He shrugs. “You wanna, like, watch a movie?”

Good. Then we won’t have to talk.

 

Of course, that last isn’t true, as anyone who has ever “watched” a movie with a friend knows. Nobody watches the movie. The whole purpose is to either run your mouth, or get laid. 

I manage to sit on the weird-ass couch without sliding off and I take the little plastic box out of my pocket and lay out rolling papers and a tiny bag of weed on his ridiculous utterly empty glasstopped coffee table. Fade watches me, scandalized. I do pretty fucking well at the rolling, for once, and light it and offer it to him.

He tries to wave it off. I don’t withdraw it. 

“Um, I don’t really, like to put chemicals in my body-“

“Fade, for fuck’s sake. It’s _weed._ It’s a vegetable. Hit it. Pussy.”

He flushes. Takes it. Hits it. Holds it like he’s new at it and then coughs like a motherfucker. I hand him his screwdriver and take the joint from him, thump him on the back. Then I have to hit it myself, quick, to get rid of the shockingly delicious sensation of how fucking _frail_ his bones are under his shirt, under his glossy-synthetic hair. He manages to get the smoke out and some screwdriver and some air in. I’m waiting for him with his next hit the second he does. 

I tell him I’m picking the movie while he’s in the middle of a coughing fit. He nods, hacking, as if I’ve asked his permission. I figure out how to open the glass front of the gigantic entertainment center and slide open the little movie-shelves underneath. It doesn’t take me long to find his stash. I know his little doublestacking trick from the bookshelf already. I put in Hellraiser and tell him to hit it again while he tries to give me back the joint. He gets enough air to protest, “I’ve seen that a million times.”

I sit beside him again, start rolling another joint. “I know.”

 

So we smoke. We get stupid. I ask him about the true-crime to watch him blush and he says maybe he’ll _be a profiler_ when he graduates. I didn’t get a very close look, but I’m tempted to ask if I’m right about the particularly _educational_ bits being dog-eared or paperclipped for quick reference. I pretend to watch the movie for a second so I don’t laugh at him too obviously. Boy, any killer worth profiling would eat you alive. Rabbit in a den of wolves. 

I’m not listening to his pretentious stoner ramble about Ramirez and the effect of cultural and racial bias on sociopathology; I’m looking at his cheekbones. So lovely under that softness. There’s something in his powder or maybe his eye makeup that glitters. I’ve drifted into the wrong mode without noticing, and I forget I don’t own this one yet and I reach out to investigate this glimmer, the bone underneath, and it’s like he was waiting for permission to lean into my hands. 

He wants me to kiss him again, but I’m smelling him, learning him. He smells, designer. Much too clean. I’m not surprised. I drag at the collar of his shirt and inhale, there, and there’s the faintest ghost of sweat and boy underneath that he hasn’t gotten around to disinfecting away just yet. It, reassures me. It makes the fake into something he’s wearing, something tacky, granted, but just a costume. 

His hands come up and cup my head, and I look up at him to see what he means by that and he kisses me. He kisses like a program waiting for input, pressing his mouth against mine and changing his angle against me so that my arms are almost around him, and just, waiting. 

I don’t have my eyes closed. I’m in something of a blind, panic; wires crossed. If I kiss him it seems as though there’s a, danger, that I’ll take a bite, or....no, maybe it’s like he’s an, incubus...or that he’ll infect me. Then I think that Nathaniel was the last person I kissed before Fade, and he was on the wrong side of dead at the time. It makes me laugh, and then we’re really kissing, and I’m somehow still laughing. 

_If he knew._

I can’t stop thinking that I’m going to get my evil germs all over this clean Citizen boy. I can’t stop thinking that maybe that’s _exactly_ what he wants. 

He tastes of vodka and orange juice and toothpaste. He smells like the kind of store I know better than to go inside. I push his hands away from my face and hold him still and kiss him hard and re-wreck his lipstick. I’d forgotten what it was like, outside of your head, without quite so much sadness attached to the arousal. I don’t love him, don’t like him. I just want to fuck him. It feels so very simple, weirdly innocent, and like such a relief. And it would be so easy.

And so, so dangerous. 

I stop kissing him. It’s sort of sudden. I say, “I need a drink,” and I take both our glasses with me. He stares after me for the second time tonight looking, heartbroken, before he turns back to the movie. There are Klonopin in my left pocket, a warm secret to bookend the knife that still lives in my right pocket. I don’t touch either, but I know I could. I come back with two new screwdrivers, having helped myself to an extra shot or three from the bottle. I can’t look at him. 

“What are you afraid of?”

My first urge, I admit, is to punch him. “Don’t you—“ _fucking dare, say that to me._

“...or, whatever it is. Whatever makes you keep, stopping.”

Well. That was almost an apology. I light a cigarette. It’s a useful thing to do when you’re speechless. There’s no ashtray and he pushes this expensive looking black porcelain....thing, towards me. Fuck it. 

"I mean..." He blushes. Fidgets. “I can imagine what you’re, like. I’ve read more than just that one. I’m not worried about it.”

I’m staring. I’m wasting my cigarette. I’m something a little more serious than confused or surprised. This just isn’t how the world works, you know? So I take a drag and kill most of my drink, stalling.

“I mean, I don’t care if you’re....rough...” 

I’m still staring. It’s like my throat is stuck in neutral. I finally manage to say, "Shut up. Now."

"Because, for me it’s more about what you do. I’m just going to be there, like, an accessory. You can do anything you--"

"Shut. Up. Fade."

He finally sees that I’m having a problem with this. He looks startled and says, "Oh, man. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings or anything, I just thought--"

He’s still not shutting up so I drop my drink and it thunks and sloshes onto the white carpet and my hand snaps out like a piston and I’m moving forward over him with my hand around his neck and he’s not even moving, not even raising his arms, he’s just hanging from my hand like all his joints are dislocated. "You, do not get it. You’re a clueless kid. This is not television."

I ease off on his neck enough to let him breathe, but I’m still holding him pinned flat on his back to the couch. He moves his mouth like oh god, reaches up and puts his hand over mine and pushes at my fingers to make me choke him again. I’m losing it. The skin of his neck is warm and complicated and I can feel his windpipe and his pulse is hammering against my palm on one side and his hair is tickling my wrist. I have to rip my hand out from under his and I get off him and brush myself off or something. I’m shaking a lot. 

I understand you, princess boy. In your tower waiting for a wound to pierce you out of the world. Spent your whole life turning things over in search of the shadow underneath with no idea why your fucking quest was failing. 

This kid has gotten everything handed to him. His life is one big padded cell. Nothing he knows has ever been difficult. He's after, some big new not-so-shiny experience. He's bored. He thinks I'm some kind of amusement, like this is a video game. Slumming with the peasants to see what it’s like outside the light, sniffing around me because I smell so much like the dark. 

Congratulations, kid. The abyss has finally noticed you and is taking a good long look.

He’s lying on his back on the couch with the black sheet crumpled around him, makeup ruined, hand at his neck, panting and glaze-eyed with his pants tented. I smile. I just can’t help it. Lord, make me straight, but not today.

I shove his cute wittle skull-patterned sock feet aside, so that he’s forced to sit up. I sit beside him. Behind his head Pinhead is menacing Kirsty. 

“I’m going to tell you a story. You like stories. You like _my_ stories.” I hook his waistband and his stomach flinches away from me and I unbutton and unzip his vinyl fucking suffering-free pants. “Once upon a time there was a pretentious little bitch named Fade.” 

I yank at him until he makes a frightened little cry and realizes what I mean and raises his hips. I drag down the cute wittle black designer boxer-briefs in presumably suffering-free cotton along with his pants and leave them bunched at his knees. I take his hands away from his neck and lick both his palms, which makes him stop breathing. Then I steer them to his erection. He dyes his pubic hair, which is unbelievably gay and astoundingly endearing of him, and he has a delicate happy-trail and the narrowest possible hips. 

“And when he was a tiny boy he saw something that scared him. Probably on TV. Something to do with blood and screaming and knives and Mommy turning the channel and nobody answering his questions.”

He looks like he thinks I might have gone crazy. He’s not moving his hands and until I move them for him I don’t think he realizes I want him to masturbate. It makes him chew his lip over some little whine that I still catch and note. Huh. Putting on a show for me with every light in the house on isn’t what he had in mind. Too bad. 

“What are you-“

I put my hand around his neck again. Shush him, even though he’s already pretty fucking quiet suddenly. “And it gave him nightmares.”

He’s too skinny to be round, and yet he’s still somehow composed of only curves, elegant dick a mouth-colored arch into his hands, not a sharp edge to him. As if he’d never known such a thing in all his soft life, never learned to grow one. 

“For awhile he tried to hide from anything scary at all, but the nightmares didn’t go away. Dad gave him a pep talk about facing your fears. So he started to read.”

He’s blushing. 

I think he knows this story. 

I glare at his hands and he keeps them moving, staring at nothing in the direction of the closed blinds. “And here was what grownups did about those nightmares, why, they started little CLUBS, with acronyms and logos and everything, declaring themselves against genocide and bologna and Ed Gein and violence on television, like little fucking knights errant defending the world from the, screams.“ 

I predator in on him, deliver the blow of that last word with my mouth very close to his ear. His teeth click together. He swallows. 

“And, my, goodness, now, you have to read more, and more, and faster, and faster, you have to know every single detail, to be properly appalled, it’s _necessary_ that you know about Mengele and the conveyor belts in slaughterhouses and how, fucking, big, Ramirez’s hands really are...” 

I’m still in his ear. Lip-chewing. He closes his eyes and I force him to open them again, just by thinking about it. His hands are moving faster.

“There’s no end to what this boy reads. It’s for research. It’s his moral duty. All the grownups tell him how fucking sensitive he is. He joins all the clubs and stops eating meat and carries all the flags and helps make all the signs, and for a little while the nightmares go away. And then they’re back, after yet another thing he couldn’t get out of his head-“

“-you-“

I close my hand again. He shushes again. “Always plenty of meat to feed whatever that is inside him that he says he’s trying to starve. And the more he feeds it the bigger it gets. “

He’s keeping rhythm, now. Breathing faster. Starting to gleam in that luminous skinsticky way. 

“And then he found a bite with a hook in it. And now, some of the nightmares are the kind that end with you waking up in a puddle of your own--”

“Fuck _you_ \--“ He takes his hands away from his cock and I shove my thumb into his windpipe hard until he puts them back where I told him to keep them. 

“What’s the matter, Fade? I thought you wanted me to hurt you? Rough trade to scratch your suburban fucking itch?” 

“Stop it-“

“I stop when you stop, and you stop when you come.” 

Aw. That was almost hatred. His eyes almost had a color there for a second; they would’ve been the color of his little plastic tiger. “Or we can do it round robin, and you can tell me the story for awhile. How close am I?”

He’s shaking like something’s caught in his throat. I can feel the breakdown happening right, under my, thumb. He says “No,” to nothing in particular. Looking at me now, aren’t you, pretty boy?

“Where are the buttons? Your particular hooks?”

Head-shaking. Teary-eyed accusative, staring, with his hands a blur. 

“ _Is_ it the hooks, or that slaughter by genital electroction, or chloroform?“

His eyes flutter closed. 

“Or what it’d be like to wake up in someone’s basement with your hands tied behind you and your ass bleeding?“

He bares his teeth and says _fuck you fuck_ you and comes, panting against my face with his pulse throbbing into my palm. I let go of his neck as a reward and stroke his damp hair and smile. That simple. 

I give him a minute to catch his breath, because he was so very good, all in all. And then I tell him, “Lick it off.”

He makes some confused little mrrf, sleepyeyed at me. I lean away from him and snatch at his hands and shove them towards his face. “Lick it off. What’s the matter? Is there some vegan fucking rule against it? The poor little sperm?”

He’s crimson. He closes his eyes, and I allow that, licks with an unhappy nosewrinkle. I shove at his hands and say _tongue_ until he figures out how to fake some enthusiasm. 

I’m having a lot more fun than I should be. 

He’s shaking with humiliation, and I wrap one hand around his softening cock and milk at it hard and smear the result in one arc across the glass top of the coffee table. He watches me do it and pushes at me, shaking his head. 

I snatch that perfect handful of hair, right at the nape of his neck, and drag him off the couch. Scuffle, with the ashtray hitting the carpet (intact, but with complete spillage) and a wail from him as his knees hit the floor and I thump his face into the glass. 

Tongue. 

I make him lick a lot longer than necessary. He’s crying before he’s finished. It’s really fucking pretty from under the table. 

I pretend to find some on the carpet and make him lick that for a minute or so, mostly to watch him try to crawl with his pants around his knees. His shirt covers all but the undercurve of his ass. His thighs are awfully childlike, flawlessly cream-colored. I steer him across enough carpet to burn his knees and his palms for him, with a thump or two into the table and the entertainment center just to hear the little noise driven out of him, before dragging him back up to the couch. He curls up with his back to me beside me, face hidden, subsiding. I make him hand me my ashtray. Light another cigarette. 

After a very long time he says, “Now what?”

I stub out my cigarette. Stand up with my keys in my hand. “It’s way, way past your bedtime.”

 

I drive the two hours home with a half-hour out of my way to stop off in Riverside, at the club where David and I met. The magnetism of the place draws me there and I park out in front of it. It’s boarded up. 

If I could think of a way to steal enough money to buy it. I’d live in there. It’s be like this weird _The Crow_ thing, I’d build a shrine to him and leave it all boarded up and set up the lights and play music and dance all by myself for the mirrors. 

It’s like four AM. I have to work in less than four hours. I smoke and stare at the boarded up windows, and try to remember David’s face. I can see his mouth, and his black cord necklace, and his Adam’s apple (sharp, gawky, sexy) and his hair, but not his face all at once. The eyes are missing. Dark, deep-set, with liquid eyeliner done too perfectly. 

Wait. There. 

My eyes sting, and I’m sorry I’ve succeeded.

I guess you’re fucking sick of hearing about him. David, I mean. Fuck you. So am I.

I hold onto it as long as I can stand to, groping around until I find a tshirt that’s clean enough to put in my lap but dirty enough to come on. I masturbate underneath it, with my eyes closed, and it’s Fade I think about no matter how hard I try to hold the David hologram; it’s Fade licking semen off his hands while the Cenobites flicker on the screen behind his head. I can’t make his tongue look real. 

TRIPHAMMER

The next week, of course. Fade’s out on the dance floor when I get there. He’s gorgeous. Somehow I’d failed to properly notice that before. He’s doing this slow, deliberately clumsy dance to something like Frontline Assembly. I just stand there and watch him. Red vinyl shirt, so shiny it looks liquid, cut like a tight men’s buttondown. Black velvet pants. Doc Martens. He’s getting better at the makeup, too. He’s doing it now like I did it in my car-complete with the line. That’s an omen, just for me. A question. 

I buy a screwdriver for me and a stupid pink thing for him. He comes over, and he’s wearing women’s fucking perfume and it’s so drastic that I’m stunned. It’s too sweet. It smells like food. "Hey."

I say something back to him, and hand him his drink. He gets this look on his face, like I’ve done something either embarrassing or touching. Then he leans over and yells, "Did you think about what I said?"

"I told you to shut up about that," I yell back. He blinks, and I have to lean extremely close to his ear--that fucking perfume--and yell it again. 

He reaches into his back pocket and does gymnastics until he pulls out a folded-over envelope. "Read this?"

Oh, for fuck’s sake. "What is it?"

"Just read it."

"I said--"

"Please," he says, his face up against my neck, and he kisses my ear, a messy embarrassing little bribe. I push him off. He shouts something after me, but I ignore him and keep going.

I lock myself into one of the stalls and light a cigarette. Two guys are arguing near the sinks. I work my fingernail under the flap and tear the letter open. Red paper in a red envelope. It’s closed with a little gilt sticker that says something about the rainforest, for fuck’ sake. It looks dangerous. 

_I can’t stop thinking about what you did to me. I did it again, alone, but it isn’t the same, because what it must have looked like to you was what I liked the most about it. I missed you. Love, Fade._

Love, damn it. 

Love is for Brandon Lee and Morrison and Hendrix and Burroughs, for Sid and Nancy and poor lonely Dahmer. Love is for _Road Warrior_ and _Dune_ and _Blade Runner_ and the Cruxshadows, Rozz Williams and Bauhaus and Leaether Strip and Coil, for that Deathstyle song where LeClaire sobs _vicious faaaaag._ Love is for Alien Sex Fiend on vinyl. Love is for telescopes so good you can see Saturn and dream of standing on the surface and looking up at an alien sky.

Love is for being stoned and settling down at the keyboard with a cigarette and typing like one endless neurogasm. Love is for when the words cradle each other close like teeth, so tight you can't take them apart. Love is for books that dig their claws in and drag you shaking through another universe, turn you loose with new ghosts in your head to adore.

Love is for darkangel boys, for the shapes their shadows make in a million colors on a painted black floor, love is for the dance of jewelry and sneers. Love is for the lean atrocity angle of a starvation ribcage under cotton and safety pins and tape and sweat. Love is for a boy I saw in a shirt that said in radioactive green, THIS IS GOTH. SUCK MY DICK. Love is for bruises and sobbing and incoherent convulsions, love is for pain and art and the texture of dyed hair. Love is for antique autopsy kits and vintage corsets, the smell of wet dirt and attics. Love is for driving really fast at night with the dark highway below you and the dark cosmos above you.

Love is for Lucifer and Nathaniel. Love is for Shelley.

Love is for _David._

Love is _not_ for a fan letter from a pseudogoth.

I can see Fade sitting in that ridiculous house, licking the strip of this envelope. 

I hate him. I _want_ him. And not in a good way. 

I want him to ruin him.

I’m tempted to shred the note and flush it. Instead I crumple it and stuff it in my pocket. Because technically, at this point, it belongs in Lady Stardust’s suitcase with the other relics.

 

This little bitch, of course, spends the rest of the night following me, buying me drinks, fawning over me, watching me on the very rare occasions when I dance. I'm pretty sure he’s going to go out and buy the CD for every song that makes me leave the bar.

He gives me weird vibes, like he’s this bizarre reverse abuser. If I reached over and punched him right now, knocked that pretty head around and destroyed his sunglasses, he...his cheek would sting my hand, or I’d break my wrist, or he’d transform into this carnivorous plant and bite off my arm. He’s so shallow he’s convex. He’ll take more from me than he’ll ever put back. And yet here I am, again, sitting by this little bitch, again. 

Go figure.

They’re playing that London After Midnight song with _rape me_ in the chorus. David always used to dance to this so that I couldn’t unless I wanted to give up watching him-and if you know which song I mean you can imagine why I usually ended up watching. 

I shove Fade in the direction of the dance floor. I don’t have to tell him twice. He’s not right at it-he’s too tall, and he dances too much like he’s too aware of how he looks doing it. Too poised, too polished, too, European. But if I squint at him, the chin-line is right, and the dark hair is right, and this one lets me pull him close and taste his neck when he comes back to our table. If only he wouldn’t talk.

They do the Sisters’ cover of “Gimme Shelter” and I can’t help it. I’m too drunk to resist it. Fade takes my seat and I feel his eyes on me, but I pretend there’s nobody here but me and David is watching me, because I know that he did, sometimes, because sometimes I caught him doing it in the mirrors. I’m at that state of perfect drunkenness to spin clumsiness into a liquid messy grace, and the music is bigger than everything and for just that few minutes it’s quiet in my head and everything is almost all right except for a pain in me somewhere too deep for even music to reach. 

 

We wander out for some air with our cigarette-and-dry-ice-smoke. I persuade him to lie in the empty back of the truck and we smoke a joint sharing the spare tire as a pillow. He’s just gotten the Dahmer movie with Jeremy Renner and he hates it. I let him get his foot firmly into his mouth for a minute or two. “And everyone was so freaked and there’s hardly anything onscreen at all. One time, that thing at the end, and it was so _lame._ ”

I have that movie. It used to belong to a rental store that isn’t getting it back. The “lame” thing at the end is where that movie’s going to break, if anywhere; Jeff is pinning an exquisitely beautiful Vietnamese boy, reaching into a chest wound in the direction of his heart. Fade is right about this being about the only onscreen gore in that movie. My heart is pounding like I’m, embarassed, but the closest word I guess would be disappointed. Underneath the hypocrisy I thought this little bitch might, maybe, in some way, in reverse, have fucking understood me. Just a little. 

“I don’t think gore was the point of that movie. I think it was meant to be about his, life, and how sad it was. About loneliness.” 

He ponders this, letting the joint burn in his hand until I take it from him. "Do you think they actually miss them? After? Like the Dahmer or the Nilsen type ones, I mean?"

Stab. A really big heavy thud of like, pain, it’s like running into the side of a car with your ribcage, a physical sensation. Lady Stardust, on the couch with me, watching _Troll._

I feel the air whoosh out of my lungs. This is what I tend to experience when normal people experience emotions. I don’t answer right away, because I can’t answer right away, and Fade waits and then starts to look worried.

"Of _course_ he missed them. They’re dead, and, he loved them...." 

Too. Much. Information. Must...stop talking. 

I’m having the revelation that I’m cheating on David with this _idiot._

I’m fucking crying. Again. Or maybe, still. It feels like I haven’t _really_ stopped crying since I hung up the goddamn phone eons ago.

I climb out of the car, blinded. This particular fit of crying is so sudden and violent I can’t really walk. I’m collapsing around this _hunger_ to kick things and smash things and hurt people and get vengeance and teach _everybody_ that their best fucking bet is to not ever make me feel _anything._

I’m trying to get away from Fade so he can’t watch me do this. 

I wander off towards the railroad tracks that run out beside the club. Fade follows me. We’re both slogging through gravel, me with my hands over my face, doubled over and sobbing, and him trying to figure out whether or not to hug me or even touch me. He’s too afraid to. 

I give up walking and kneel and just sob until it passes. I can hear them playing Peter Murphy in the club, even though it’s just a blur of bass and shiny plasticy chords. It’s that song about fields of green, take me to the stars for free. It’s sad. The entire fucking world is sad. I guess this would be cool if it was in a movie, some kind of powerful moment, but it’s not. It’s just me and him outside in the dark with green streetlights and the sound of crickets and the club behind us. It’s a little too cold to be comfortable, but not so cold that you need a jacket. I’m the loudest thing around, making this ugly hoarse crying noise, and the little group of goth kids cluttering the front walkway aren’t even bothering to stare in our direction. It’s embarassing and ugly and I wish I was anywhere else, anyone else.

"You fucking tell anyone I cried like this, I’ll kill you." 

He looks at me like this makes him, pity me. 

I wipe my nose on the sleeve of my shirt and light a cigarette.

 

I drive him home. I won’t go in. I want to. I want to sleep in that obscene waterbed with

(……) 

him, just to hear someone else breathing, just to have the bed warm without using a heating pad or an electric blanket.

He pleads. I won’t go in.

He switches to pleading with me to wait a second until I nod and sit in his driveway smoking a cigarette while he runs inside and comes out with a joint that I’m positive someone else rolled for him. We smoke while he stares at me adoringly and I ramble about Dahmer and how fucked up it is, how he lived, how he died. How fucked up it is that most of my highschool spent that entire day he was murdered celebrating, making little signs, trotting out all the Dahmer jokes. How Jeff’s school blacked out that picture in the yearbook where he snuck into the honor society, made him into a black shape before he ever made himself into a black shape. How I have that non-picture printed out and hanging in a frame on my wall. 

He doesn’t understand.

He makes comments about how the circle of violence has to end and how psychology will eventually identify what combination of nurture and nature produces a Dahmer so that it can never happen again. I nod at his reassurance that he’s studying very hard to help Them put an end to creatures like me. Then I pull his head into my lap and order him to suck my dick.

 

He insists quietly while trying to get me unfastened that he’s never done this successfully and doesn’t like it. I tell him I believe him and then shove my cock in his mouth. 

Shelley is great for this. No hump in the middle of the seat, just a nice long wide bench for him to sprawl on and a nice set of nooks for me to brace my feet and my knees. He makes insincere little unhappy noises and settles down when I let him use one hand so I’m not hitting the back of his throat. He’s not very good at it, but what he lacks in tolerance he attempts to make up for in sincerity. At least he knows enough to keep his teeth off me. 

I’m having a Hell of a time, and not in a good way. Voluntary sex seems...weird. Like a dress rehearsal or a trial run. 

I close my eyes and sift through the porn in my head and settle on a hybrid with Fade in his garage sitting on the empty workbench, tied to the wall with all that pegboard behind him, naked and dirty and wide-eyed and a whole lot of sorry. I’m interested in a hammer and nails, lately. It’s all the different pitches of screaming you’d get, and the fact that the torture itself makes them more and more immobile. It’s the idea of all those different sizes and shapes of nails, and the little accidents that could happen with misses and with the claw side of the hammer. 

Out here I have to settle for muffled moaning if I want to keep his dick in my mouth, but in my head he can scream all I like, make all kinds of promises and bargains, sob at me _no not there_ and _take them out._

It’s working better than it was. I stroke all that overdyed hair and hold his head and make him suck harder and deeper than he wants to. In my head he’s shrieking in my ear. Out here he’s swallowing and gagging and making very cute little polite noises to ask me to for fuck’s sake let him breathe. In here he’s bleeding, thrashing, pinned to the wall like something I’m getting ready to dissect, and I still have so many nails. 

When I finally come I’m more in my head than in my car.

I kiss him before he goes in. It surprises him. 

He asks if I have his number, and when I tell him I don't he scrawls it on the back of a bill and I ball it up and put it in the same pocket as his note. 

He waves at me before he closes the door behind him. I watch until I can see by the light in the window that his television is on. 

I'm exhausted. I'm tempted to go knock on his door. Tell him I changed my mind. Pretend for a few hours that we're a couple, watch a movie and sleep on his expensive leather couch. 

No. I could never sleep in that alien house. The air is too clean; the sudden lack of toxins would send me into withdrawal. I'd suffocate. Or I might start to get _better_ and we can't, have, that. And it'd make me a traitor, to enjoy a great big television and all that soft carpet, to drink myself sick and not make a dent in the bar. 

Instead I drive home, morals intact, where I can get drunk in peace and spill things without guilt. 

 

ABUSE

 

Hell help me, Fade seems to think we're _dating._

One night, after he's sucked my dick we're smoking, parked somewhere Florida-abandoned, halfpaved with junk decorating the fringes of a ruined fence. I have a few such places memorized around north Florida, filed in my head under just-in-case. I've discovered if I take him somewhere I could theoretically kill him without anyone hearing it makes it much easier for me to get off. So I'm post-coital, radio on, darkness and stars and a joint and a boy I'm feeling almost fond of at the moment. This is as close to happy as I've been in a long time.

Then he lays this business on me:

"My parents wanted to know if you wanted to come to dinner, maybe next weekend?"

I'm aghast. Sorry to be so Lovecraft but there's no other word for it. It doesn't help that the shock causes me to lose control of a large quantity of marijuana smoke, which riots happily down into my stomach and up into my sinus cavities. One seizure later I manage, "Are you fucking crazy?"

"...uh, no? I thought-"

"Yeah? You thought what?"

He's staring fixedly into my visor-mirror, touching up lipstick he's already repaired. "They know that I'm gay, Erik, and they're used to how kids dress. I know how you are about, money, or whatever, but they're really not like you think. They're _happy_ about you, they just wanted to meet you. If you don't want to go-"

"No, Fade. I do _not_ want to go. What in the fuck did you say to them?"

He flips my mirror back up much too hard. "I told them I was seeing someone, I-"

"Well, you're not. We are not dating, or going out, or whatever the fuck."

He's staring out the window, instead of into the mirror. He's breathing too hard, like maybe he's, angry? Hurt? "Erik." His voice fractures. "Why don't you _like_ me?"

Oh, for fuck's sake. "I like you fine, Fade." When you're quiet.

"You don't. And I _know_ that I'm your type and I've been nothing but nice to you, and I thought we had, lots in common." Sniffle. Pretty little daub at his undereyes.

Dammit, Fade. We have in common what lions and motherfucking gazelles have in common.

You _know_ that you're my type because you're imitating my type from my motherfucking stories, and a few other scattered sources. You're a...collage. On you the goth is just the same as the corporate uniform on any of Them. And that's what makes you _not my fucking type._ You're doing it because you _decided_ to and not because you have to.

I know, I'm supposed to feel guilty. Pretty boy from a nice family that cheerfully sucks my dick and has the sense to wear black and listen to subversive music, and I'm being an ungrateful, hostile bastard. I wish he would shut up. He's making my headache worse, and like I'd rather do just about anything but have some drama.

"Would you like me better if I fucking got a job and an apartment? Or I quit school? If you would just tell me--" 

I lean over and just keep coming until it's a little too close to be called _looming over_ and our eyes are too close to function in three dimensions anymore. "So far you're not succeeding in the decor."

It takes him a second, and he realizes what I mean and that I'm _being_ mean and his face, crumples. Then, small "What am I doing wrong?"

"Lots, but it's mostly _you_ that's wrong." I ponder telling him that being one of Us has to come from inside, that you have to dress like a Martian zombiewhore because you want to, not because you want to fit in with the other Martian zombiewhores. "Maybe if you lost weight."

Tears, already? Not sobbing, but my, as sudden as those thunderstorms at the beach. "I'm not _fat,_ I weigh like a hundred and twenty pounds..."

True. "You're not even close to fat, but we're going for....not quite death-camp, but pre-anorexia. Not skinny enough to be sick, but skinny enough to look sick." Frail. Angular. Pointed. Bones drawn under all this white skin with occasional geography of ink and bracelet and scar. 

Sniffle. "....okay." 

I'm thrown, by that, but I absorb it like radiation pretty quickly..

"Look at me." His eyelashes are wet. The two most gorgeous parts of tears are when they've just started, and when they're utterly without structure, one continuous leak of wet and howl. I pull my sleeve up over my hand, without thinking, and do one businesslike scrub at his nose. I feel like a photographer adjusting a model. Sniffle, and renewed tear-leak, eyes shiny. No, he'll never do. He's like, a prototype. A sketch before the painting. 

"And you're too....uh, _neat._ You've never had to struggle at anything. You've got no depth at all." 

He stares at me, eating every word.

"The outside looks, like a costume, because you don't suit it. You need, damage." I light a cigarette. Pretend not to notice how very hooked he is. "You need to be less sane. Less...synthetic. You need to experience things that aren't designer." 

_You need, what your appetites have been begging you to chase since you were just a tiny all-American boy. You need the knives. You need all that soft cut away; you need me._

"And you need to smoke." I lean past him, open the glovebox, get him one of the ubiquitous emergency cloves. I light it for him and put it in his manicured hand. He puts it to his lips, looking at me for a reprieve. Then he inhales, signs over his manicured soul.

 

I call him the next day. He picks up on the third ring, sleepfuzzed. I offer to call back and he says, "No, no..." 

Thunk. Plonk. Rustling. 

"I didn't think you'd call me. I mean, this, soon."

He means, at all.

I squint at the clock. Not quite noon. I haven't slept. I've been lying in Our Bed and thinking and masturbating and smoking too many cigarettes. Tiny remaining misfires from scraps of program from when I used to be human kept me awake. I spent most of the night thinking of Fade, having the disconcerting revelation, that he's...sentient...that I've hurt him when he has, as he said, been nothing but nice to me, and that he doesn't know why. And that I can't tell him why. And that in the end it isn't going to matter why, and I'm certainly going to hurt him again before I'm through with him. 

I've got to get him out of that house, out of all that sterile perfumed middle America and into my Lair where I can make him sick sick sick and get him dirty dirty dirty. 

"I want you to come and stay here, awhile. Likerehab Or a retreat. "

_(I want to redesign you)_

"...really?" He sounds, stunned. And then, Hell help me, he sounds _delighted._ "Well, I don't have classes again till September, so I'm game for a, game..."

So that's what he thinks this is. A sex-game that may or may not change him, or my opinion of him, or whatever. It's a game, all right, but I'm the only one playing. That's all it is to me, really. Something to do. It's as good a way to pass the time as any, consummating my hate for this boy. 

"It won't take anywhere near as long as that." I have no idea how long it will take. 

Quiet. Crackles like he's opening something. "So, like, how long? A week? Two weeks?"

"...about that." No idea, kid. No real plan. Just visuals of you here in the process of being remade, waiting for me to come home from work with all that mindless adoration. I could use a pet. 

"I mean, so I'll know, how many clothes to bring."

"I have clothes for you already.." 

That throws him for a minute, but he doesn't ask for details. "...okay..."

"Go wake up. I'll call you back ."

"Okay, I'll talk to you then-"`

"Wait."

There's no click. He waits. "Bring all your hidden books, and all your hidden movies, and all the scrapbooks and journals and whatever else you have. And your computer. Just the tower, I mean."

He's so cute when he's speechless. "...why?"

"Because, if I know how you're put together, I'll know how to take you apart." Because from what's in your dropdown menus alone I should be able to decrypt you in a day or three, tops. It's not like you're complicated.

Quiet. Breathing. "Kay." 

That one was a _lot_ more subdued. Good. 

It's already started. It started weeks ago. It started when I first met him.

 

The Lair. The ludicrous fucking _list_ of things I have to do to the Lair. Here's another bit you can set to music of me running around like a crazy fuck. I suggest Leaether Strip's "Strap Me Down." 

I take all my clothes and lock them in the tool shed; drag the great big garbage can on wheels into the house and into the kitchen and open the fridge and fill the trashcan with everything that doesn't contain meat. Open the cabinets and throw out cans of vegetable soup and green beans and peaches and pears and and an armload of soup packets and saltines and peanuts and a box of microwaveable popcorn. Haul it out to the curb again. Restocking will be a nice piece of foreplay on the way back from his house. 

Run to my computer, to download a bunch of PETA videos that are going to take an eternity on my bastard Atari. I hope they're ready in time for dinner. Run, to pick up dirty laundry, wash my avalanche of dishes, put away my avalanche of books. Hide a few things on my computer. Check on the videos. Shower and shave and put on eyeliner and despair over my fucking eternally big hair. Wander out to the tool shed in boots and a bathrobe to despair over my clothes. (Black jeans and black tshirt with a red Baphomet and black leather jacket. Same boots. No bathrobe. )

Smoke. Masturbate. Call the little bitch back. "I'm coming to get you."

Ah. So good. A joke just for me is the very best kind.

He says _love you_ before I hang up. Oh, kid. That's going to be the first thing I beat out of you. As soon as I'm finished using it against you.

He lugs a suitcase out to the car that seems to be very fucking heavy. I scowl at him in the mirror while he throws it in the back. He gets in, panting, and says immediately, "It's the computer, and the books. This is all I brought. No clothes. " He holds up a backpack covered in patches. Grins, waiting for me to reward him for being so obedient. I pat him. Inquire as to his possession of an ATM card.

We drive to the first ATM I spot. He has to get out to use it. Oh, he's much too tall-almost eye level-he even walks with that slouchy hood thing that tall makes you do, though with a little more, uh, Muppet, than I have when I do it. I hope. He comes back, presents me with a green handful, tells me that's all it'll let him take out till tomorrow. Nonchalant. I can't imagine what it must be like to have never worried about money. We drive north towards my territory with the sun blazing through my window. There's not much talk, music and silence to let him worry and the sound of the engine roaring closer to the Lair by way of the nearest grocery store. 

 

In the store it's cold and it has that grocery smell of freezer and pumpkin and onion and apple and bread and coffee and Chinese food and rotisserie chicken and little kids. Fade follows me white as a ghost with his bug-eyed black sunglasses on and all the red in his hair tied up somehow so that it's a voodoo pouff on the top of his head. I watch him trailing behind me in one of those wallmounted mirrors. I'm tempted to let him catch up to me, put my arm around him so everyone will know he's mine with the added bonus of pissing off breeders more than our mere existence already is. Sadly I'm too occupied by pushing the world's most contrary-ass shopping cart. Bumpty bumpty bump. Ci-bo-la, ha. 

I throw in chicken and chicken livers and sardines and standing rib roast and bacon and ham and eggs and three kinds of sausage. Great big T-bone steaks that I make them cut us with the damn tail still on. Shrimp and gleaming crimson salmon fillets. 

He hasn't said a word, and I can't tell if he's watching me. He hasn't tried to pick up or buy anything, so I don't get to tell him he's not allowed to. I tell him to go and bring me diet Coke and pork rinds and he glides off and back again with exactly what I told him to get. Sets it neatly in the cart with all this carnage. Says _you're welcome_ to my _thank you._ He's wearing this black-raspberry lipstick that makes me want to chew him. Over to the deli for roast beef and turkey and fudge samples. I hand him a little walnut-speckled wedge. He does a subdued but sincere little eyes-closed bliss. 

It's not chocolate's fault it doesn't count as meat. I intend to get it reclassified as soon as I take over the world. Well. Right after I redecorate.

I have to get this one home. I can't wait to break his heart. 

And here, oh my goodness, is another sample, and this one is of little bits of beef with a postage-stamp sized bit of green pepper on one toothpick. 

I pick one up. Slide just the green pepper off the top and eat it myself. I wait till I swallow to let him wonder before I dangle what's left on the toothpick at him, hold it up to his mouth. 

Bug-eyed glasses reflecting me, making him alien-expressionless. "Erik, I don't-"

"You do now."

_Until I let you go._

_Ever again._

Quiet. What I assume is a baleful stare. He opens his mouth. Lets me insert it and obligingly closes his teeth and tugs the bite of dead cow free of the toothpick when I withdraw it. Then he just, holds it. I'm tempted to take off his sunglasses so I can watch his eyes but the stupid fucking clerk is already looking at us funny, squinting at my cart overflowing with poor slaughtered animal parts. 

"You havin' a barbeque?"

Fade shakes his head. He's not talking to the clerk. 

I say "Oh yes." I'm not talking to the clerk either. 

Fade turns his face away. I can see by his jaw that he's trying to chew, and I can see by the heave in his throat and the twitch in his shoulders that he isn't succeeding very well. The unhappiness on his face increases the more chewing he does. Texture. Meat feels like nothing but meat. Ah, and then there's the grease of it; the roundmolecule satisfying slide of animal fat. It takes him several false tries and a long, long time to swallow. 

This is going to be so, fucking, beautiful. 

Which reminds me. 

On the way home we stop at a pawn shop, still safely distant from my zip code. Though my attempts at sneaky are halfassed at best, at this point. If nobody busted me with Lady Stardust I'm pretty sure Lucifer is involved. 

I make him stay in the car and I buy an ancient videocamera that for fuck's sake just takes the same goddamn tape that you stick in a VCR. I throw in a battered tripod that the man gives me for half off while peering at me over thick glasses like he's scared. I suppose I looked very, excited. 

Brief little interlude at Wal-Mart for a large-ass block of blank tapes and a real tarp, which they actually fucking have in black, for love of Hell. Not that I intend to need one, but I've been looking for one for about six thousand years and I'm not passing up what's probably the only shipment of them in the known universe.

I realize about a mile from my Lair that I don't feel like making any of this complex stuff for dinner. As a compromise I pull into whichever burger joint and order two of the biggest with bacon and cheese. I don't think he'll be able to do it. Not tonight. Not this soon.

 

"Last chance." 

He's finally taken off the sunglasses. He won't look at me, but he seems to be making a decided, effort, to be his usual, cheerful, self. Sang along with the "Safety Dance" on the radio briefly. 

"If I show you where my Lair is, I'll have to kill you."

I wonder if he'll find this funny later, or if it'll make him start crying all over again in the dark. 

Smile. Shyness? "Can't wait."

Note to self. Fade is not at all psychic, or I am damn, damn good. Or he really still thinks he's a masochist.

Trying to imagine what my place looks like to his gated-community eyes makes me notice it again myself. The house isn't much from the outside. It used to be gray and white; the yard is vaguely wooded with the usual Florida pine and what are probably weeds that grow large enough for me to use them as randomly scattered bushes. Around the house is a wild tangled riot of poppy and morning glory and whatever other seeds managed to grow after I threw them into the yard and sprayed them with the hose. The "lawn" is mostly dollarweed and sand. It's a far cry from the _landscaping_ around the Fadehaus. 

He bump-drags the suitcase up behind me up the crumbling steps and into the dim cool inside of my weed-and-cigarette-and-incense scented Lair. Enter freely, and all that cal. 

He does the tourist three-sixty, suitcase forgotten, practically agog at my, uh, decor. I suppose in its own way my Lair is as sigiled-out as Nathaniel's was, except I've had months and months to do it. He seems particularly stricken by the wall behind my computer desk. It's littered with pictures of boys in lipstick in geometric ritual shapes, sometimes collaged with anatomical diagram colorplate organs I've razored out of books in many, many libraries. 

There are NOT enough boys for this, so I had to convert a few of them myself. You should try this sometime, ha. All you need is some magazines and a black ink pen, preferably not a ballpoint. Red comes in handy too. Really passes the time in detention or doctor's offices. You'd be surprised who becomes fuckable. My favorite is one where I've gothed what's his name, the angelic anorexic boy from that five-minute band with the dumb name. Daniel something. Poor kid. He looks goddamn good in lipstick, though to be fair he already looks goddamn good without it. And the band would be tolerably good if they had anything to sing about. (The water in the sink? What the fuck?)

Fade decides to ignore this ode to gore, and smiles instead at the life-sized Aladdin Sane threatening anyone who has to pass him to get into the kitchen. He tells me it's cool with a lot of o's. I don't know if he means the whole place or just Bowie. I crackle the greasy fragrant bag I'm carrying at him, and ask if he'd like to smoke up before or after dinner. 

 

Four bong hits and three-quarters of my cheeseburger later Fade hasn't even managed to open his sandwich. I'm eating as slowly as possible, too, making amused little bets with myself as to how long it'll take him. Tape of old Cleopatra videos making background noise. I finish mine and reach over and unwrap his for him. Watch him study it like he's learning its habits. 

He does one of the three or four possible things, and reaches out and takes off the top bun-prelude to disassembling the sandwich and reassembling it without the slab of ground corpse in the middle, presumably-and I reach out and slap his hand, not really hard enough to hurt, like you might to a kid who won't use a fork. 

He drops the bread back onto the meat, stares at me. He goes from stunned to indignant to resigned when I don't drop my eyes. He reassembles his burger and picks it up. Studies its habits from closer in. 

I pick up my trash and make myself scarce into the kitchen. When I come back the cheeseburger is sitting neatly in the unwrapped foil on the table again, with one minuscule fucking bite missing. He's chewing, slowly, eyes on the TV and a million miles away. I'm positive he's _counting_ how many times his jaw goes up and down. Long long pause and that little hitching false-try swallow again, but faster than the first time. I wonder what he's thinking.

He manages the equivalent of two normal-person bites in about nine Fade-sized nibbles, and then very politely asks where my restroom is. I tell him last on the left with no particular tone of voice and watch him excuse himself. 

Thrum in the wall of running water. He's gone for a very long time. After about ten minutes I follow him, tap very politely on the closed bathroom door and tell the noise of the running sink that there's a new toothbrush in the cabinet if he would like one. He says _thank you_ like he's swallowed a lot of glass. 

I settle down for some Coil. Finish his cheeseburger. Pick up the random mustard-and-picklesmeared paper to tidy up and bring a glass of Diet Coke with ice and nothing else for him. He rejoins me in time for the Thrill Kill Kult video, powder and lipstick newly applied and red-eyed underneath. "I'm sorry." He sits down again, on the very edge of the couch like it might get germs on him. 

I put the glass in his hand. Shrug. "When you're hungry enough, it'll stay down." 

"You're a bitch," he says, but it somehow comes out as not quite as hostile as I think he'd hoped. I think he thinks it's like, hazing. And he looks flattered and aroused at being the center of my attention. 

I don't want to, but I have to add this, "I was proud of you for trying."

He shrugs back, but I see his back straighten. I'm already in his index files. Now to start adjusting what directs to where. He needs a little disorder in his universe. I think of him licking his pretty offwhite carpet with his pretty offwhite ass in the air, and I almost like the little bitch for a minute. Fortunately, it passes.

 

We watch _Blade Runner._ I mourn the popcorn until I relent and wander outside to retrieve it from the trashcan. I wander back in with it under my shirt and make a bag without telling him where it came from. Throw some rum on top of his Coke. I bring him sheets and pillows and blankets for the couch. He doesn't do the little things that mean I've hurt his feelings, so I'm spared stuttering some lie about Our Bed.

 

The next morning he sits in front of bacon and eggs and patiently says to me, "I've decided this isn't something, I'm willing to do."

I'm halfway through my share of the bacon. Crunch. "What?"

"Eat meat. I just....I know, you want to damage me," Dear gods, he's been rehearsing this all night. "But that's not something I want damaged and not something I'm willing to, change. You proved your point that I'm a, hypocrite, or whatever, or that I'd try it if you told me to, and I feel plenty, guilty, if that's the other thing you were trying to, do." He blushes. Makes me wonder what else I've managed to do. It's a speech. It's really, really darling. And I think he's finished. I take my time and the last few crunches of delicious fried pig fat before I answer. "Then you'll starve."

He gives me the sigh and eyeroll that teenagers give insufferable parents. "Uh, _no,_ Erik, I"ll leave."

And now it's fried eggs with the yolk runny-yellow as roadstripe paint. "If you can start my car, you can leave. And you can keep her."

He's, teary, or mad, or something again. "Very funny. That's very funny. I thought you wanted me to come here to, to-"

"The keys are on that hook by the door, unless I've lost them." I'm drawing sigils in egg yolk. 

He stares at me for a long time, seething, and then gets up and heads for the door. I let him. I usually fry potatoes with this, but those went to the road with the rest of the rabbit food. I hear the jangle of my keys, and the door opening. Good. He hasn't looked for anything, which amuses me, because his boots and what's left of his wallet are locked in my tool shed, along with all the telephone cords. I hope he doesn't step in anything poisonous in my yard. 

Racheting cough of the starter. Hack hack hack vroom. Vroom. A lot of cheerful vroom. I'm almost finished with my eggs. I consider eating Fade's, but I can't do that for the week or so I suspect it'll take him to adapt to his new environment, or it'll be me that needs the diet. He'll be back in a minute, maybe he'll eat them then.

I can almost hear him smirking to himself. Showed me, didn't he. Started right up. The thump that you feel more than hear that means he's put it into reverse...and then a whack and a putt and quiet.

If he knew what a carburetor was, he could fix this with a screwdriver in about five minutes. That's how long it took me to mess it up this way. Even without the tweak it's possible to drive the car with some silly dicking around with the gearshift and the gas pedal. I'm betting with a great deal of confidence that he doesn't know this.

Silence. The racheting cough of the starter and the vroom again.

He tries it at least half a dozen times. I wander to the screen door to see how he's enjoying this game so far. I can smell that he's flooded it. He's nearly sobbing with frustration. He gets out and this time, he manages to _slam_ that door as hard as you have to in order to close it. Like you mean it, pretty boy.

"What is _wrong_ with you?"

There's the question of at least the decade. 

I shrug. "I'm finishing my breakfast. You're the one having a crying fit in the front yard."

"I'll fucking _walk,_ Erik. Fuck you."

I open the door. Come down the stairs putting a cigarette in my mouth. Light it. "You don't know which direction to walk, and I"m hardly going to let you wander around in this dangerous neighborhood-" Sarcasm. I gesture at the whole lotta nothin that surrounds my house. Palm trees, scrub pine, fences and swamp. Snakes. Alligators. Angry rednecks. Nothing but more predators out there, ha. It wouldn't be _decent_ of me to let him go. He'd never survive.

He tells me _go fuck your,_ and before he can manage _self_ I have the idiot in a messy half-nelson. I spin him and throw him into Shelley, pin him between us. Like she and I are going to gangrape him. His bones clank into her rolling-iron sides. He screeches. I don't think he expected me to touch him. I get hold of his windmilling hand and snatch it behind him, between us, and twist his arm towards his shoulderblades until he strangles out a yell and stops struggling. He's crooked-spread against Shel's window and roof and door. The handle must be digging into him somewhere he doesn't like because he seems awfully interested in shoving his ass back against me. Then he goes kind of limp. Maybe what I'm doing to his neck is keeping him from breathing. Or maybe he can feel my erection. 

Here it is. "...please...." 

The very first one is always the best one. I've never fucked him, and this position is making me wonder what it might be like if I did. His hair smells like chemicals. His shoulderblades are perfect. 

"Walk. Up the stairs. Into the Lair. Quietly like a good boy."

He can't nod. 

We walk. Up the stairs. And into the Lair. He's reasonably quiet. He's not sniffling anymore. I can't wait to see this one do some real crying. 

I steer him back into the kitchen like the world's second most contrary-ass shopping cart and deposit him in his chair to face his congealing breakfast. This is not what he expected. He's still speechless. He studies it and then me and says "But I _can't._ " 

"You will. It takes a long, long time to starve, and I'm willing to bet you'll figure out how to keep it down before that happens." I watch him fail to process this unprecedented _no_ he's getting on all fronts.

"But it's not something I can help. It makes me sick..."

"No. You make you sick. You learned it when you were little. You learned you'd get attention and get to be picky about food. No one is allergic to meat, and no creature with canines is an herbivore. "

"But I won't." He has no idea how five he sounds. 

I stop listening. Pick up a piece of his bacon and snatch a handful of his hair and hold him still so I can aim for his mouth. He glares up at me and I see him grind his teeth closed. I point out, "You will, or I'll hurt you." He considers the depth of his philosophical commitment and folds. Opens his teeth and then his lips. Crunch.

 

Less than an hour later he's sick again, or so I guess from watching how very quickly he leaves me to watch _Thundercats_ by myself. Thrum in the wall of running water. 

I still think he thinks this is a, prank. Teasing like older brothers do; till it's no longer funny and somebody sprains something or doesn't get up after the shove. I need to fuck him soon. That should totally screw up his opinion of me. Or reinforce it, ha. 

 

I knock on the door till he opens it, lipstick-free and damp from the sink. "Hand me your clothes."

"Why?"

I gesture at him with the box I have. Not much of an answer. He shrugs, dragging up the hem of his shirt. He tugs it over his head and tosses me that and his black jeans and his burgundy underwear. He's not hard, and the half of him I can see through the cracked-open door is the shade of fake ivory until that crimson-and-charcoal hair. Kabukicolored boy. I hand him the box in trade. He closes the door in my face with something that's not quite a bang. 

I hear him turn the shower on in a so-there before I leave. 

 

I expect more of a fight over this, but the shower stops running and he comes back, barefoot, hair dripping down his spine and presumably into the waistband of black buttersoft leather pants that I paid a single-digit price for in a thrift store. This fills me with the intense desire to lick the crack of his ass.

At the same thrift store I scored a women's black fur coat for slightly higher single digits than the pants, which he is carrying. It's hot in Florida for fur, so you luck into a lot of it if you know where to look. LeClaire seems to be putting that trick to good use, though how the fuck anyone wears this shit in stage lights is beyond me. Fade's going to need a lot of air conditioning just to sit around my house in all this. 

He's put on the corset. I settled on one that zips up the front and laces up the back, with enough metal-and-weight to feel serious. It cost more than I have spent on clothes for myself in the past two years, but it's worth it. He plunks the fur down beside me. Underneath the, resentful, I'm smelling a current of amused. 

"Is this your idea of lingerie?" He vogues for me in a little annoyed threesixty, trying not to grin. He's probably concluded that if he threw a _real_ fit I'd let him leave. So he's assimiliated this and filed it under hazing, too.

"This is my idea of formatting your hard drive." I gesture a circle with one finger and he does the turn for me again, more slowly, with another eyeroll. I reach out and stop him when his back is to me. 

I hook my finger into the corset lacings and start pulling. I'm no expert at it but I manage. I cinch him enough to look good and tie the laces in a double-knot. Admire the armor-feel of it with my fingertips, the sense of a seam where the top edge digs into his back, censors his ribcage from my hands. Cup my hands around his waist. Delicious. Such a sense of him being contained. 

I pull him back till he has no choice but to sit in my lap. Ungainly little shuffleslide thump that collides him perfectly with my newly interested cock. The feel of that makes him moan a tiny little, and he goes limp, leans back against my chest, rests that doll-head back against my shoulder. "What are you doing?"

"You." Ha. I move his wet hair, nuzzle in at the damp side of his neck, lick at the scent of all this clean, bite him to see if vegans taste any different than other boys. If they do, it's not on the surface. He's so _soft,_ and the stays under the leather under my hands are so hard. I think of the labyrinth of textures much farther in and I bite him harder, pull with my teeth, suction hard, lean back to check the effect. Too light. I settle on the same spot again, wrap my arms and legs around him to hold him still, pull until I can taste that not-quite-blood flavor of, plasma, lymph, whatever it is. 

He's not very loud for this, trusting little soul, just a closemouthed one-note and a decidedly on-purpose grind into my cock. I adjust the tangle of our legs so that mine are holding his open and not closed, squeeze the perfect little plates of his kneecaps, scratch my sadly harmless fingernails up his leatherbound thighs, cup his zipper. 

He's hard, wriggling and making breathy little anime gasps. I squirm my hand between corset and waistband and down into his pants, thinking of incisions, moaning myself at the damp prickle of pubic hair against my palm. 

He unsnaps, unzips, revealing my hand like a magic trick. I stroke his cock much too lightly and then much too hard to hear the distressed key-change. He raises up for me; I chase him with my hips until I realize he's trying to get his pants down. Now it's ivory underweight boy with the corset bisecting all this white with mercilessly carnivorous black. 

I can't get my cock out fast enough. I don't mention a condom and neither does he. He settles back again and his skin against my skin gives me a weird sense of traitor for a second. Consorting with the middle-class unmarked enemy. Then I realize it's nothing like that at all, this act of sabotage, and I grind against him and get myself angled and my teeth in his neck again and my arms locking him trapped again. He's a blur of sticky heat against my dick; I chew him, and he rolls his hips against me and by the time I realize we're fucking we've probably been fucking for awhile. 

He's whining something about _hurts_ because of the lack of lube, but he's pushing against me harder and harder, panting too quickly to string words into a sentence. Then I'm far enough past the dry scrape of muscle for the silkslide inside of him to wrap me like a warm mouth and I hold his hips and lean so that his feet can't touch the floor and gravity makes him take every inch. 

He's stuck in that place where you can't inhale or exhale, and when his throat unlocks he says _bastard bastard bastard,_ puts his own hands on his cock because I've abandoned it, shoves against me so hard I can feel the knot of his corset-lacings pressing into my stomach. My shirt is soaked; the teeth of my zipper are chewing my thigh. I bury my face in his wet chemical hair, bury my cock in his invisible insides, bury my mouth in the crook of his shoulder. 

I come before he does, but how hard it makes me bite him sets him off, and I'm spiraling back down to sanity just in time to cover his hands with mine so that we're both stickyfingered. I smear my palm against the hourglassline of the corset. So very white against so very black. I feel between us, where my cock is rapidly losing altitude. I was hoping for red, but he isn't really bleeding. Not this time. Not yet.

He doesn't try to move, exhausted lapful of what would be a very fucking beautiful boy if I could stand him. If I could empty him, replace him. 

And some fucking gear in my brain finally, catches.

Format his drive. Delete and, reinstall.

It's post-orgasm mindwandering. It's more than that. It's not an idea yet, but I know this feeling of being, pregnant, ha, with what WILL be an idea if it doesn't escape into the memory hole or spontaneously abort. He feels some change in me; gropes behind him and tries to _hug_ me, or something. "What is it?"

"Nothing." I'm a zillion miles away. "Sudden, fucking thought for the book, is all."

"See. I'm, like, inspiring." Cuddly little adjustments of his sharp skeleton. He sounds pleased with himself.

You fucking mask that nobody is wearing. I have a muse, and you aren't him. And that's the problem. 

_Wearing._

The idea twitches through my head. I almost catch the bastard thing.

He tries a little wiggle that's more uncomfortable than cute. I pull out of him, irritated, leave him teetering on my knee, both of us leaking sperm and worse on the couch and the only fucking pants I have in the house. Damn it. 

"Will you let me read it?"

"No." I push at him till he stands up. Push at him again until he has the sense to bend over as much as he possibly can caged in cow-skin and wire. Spread his ass and lick him to see if he'll stop me, to see if he'll shut up, to see what we taste like together.

 

I ditch the pants in my overflowing hamper and wear a towel out to the shed for clean ones. I pull on black pants that would qualify as dressy if I weren't wearing them barefoot with a Baphomet shirt. Pick up the forlorn little crumple of Fade's stolen clothes from the worktable and take out what's now my wallet. Neatly tucked behind two credit cards and an ATM card is a piece of paper folded too many times with three phone numbers I don't need and a four digit PIN that I do need. 

I'm thinking, _trauma, disassociatives, possession._ I'm thinking of where the fuck several books have ended up in my disaster of a house. I'm thinking of how cute vacant isn't after such a short, short while. I'm thinking of David curled up beside me in Our Bed. 

I'm thinking, of how close to my height Fade is, of how much like the postage-stamp sized picture on his license I really look. I'm thinking about how all the freaks look alike to human eyes.

I'm thinking of an escape plan for me and my boy. My _real_ boy. 

 

Night. Fade is asleep on the couch, naked, because he pleads that the leather is too sweaty and stiff to sleep in and I told him that was really too bad. One long arm is flung over the side, fingers trailing the floor under a cascade of cartooncolored hair. He looks like a blank when he's asleep; it's not angelic or childlike, the slackness of his mouth, the absence that's the only presence in his face. It's, formless, fetal. There's that breeder fucking word again.

I'm in my room in the epicenter of an invasion of boxes from the shed. Already two cockroaches and a large spider have evacuated. The spider I covered with a cup, teased onto an envelope slid under the edge, relocated to out in the bushes. The cockroaches I quickly and permanently rearranged with a shoe and flushed what was left in a handful of tissue, gagging. Viscera, death spasms, horrible black magick, fine, but cockroaches are just _nasty._

Other than the fauna I haven't found a motherfucking thing.

This isn't surprising. I'm pretty sure if I'd wandered across anything even close to relevant I'd have remembered it. Information on how to bring people back from the dead is pretty fucking nonexistent. There's silliness about crossroads at midnight, black dogs and silver nails, the severed hands of hanged men. There are bad drawings of corpses sitting up with their arms outstretched in that Cassandra/John the Baptist pose any prophesying creature is required to use. 

Flicker of myself in a graveyard at night, surrounded by the deafening noise of frogs, crickets, open air, a shovel digging into dirt. It almost makes me physically sick. I'm pretty keen on all this dark to the point where the screams stop and the body starts to get cold. I've got a wide strange streak of squeamish, and the idea of decay from the stink of dishes left too long in the sink to the idea of bloat and rigor mortis is clearly on the _wrong_ side of that line.

Necromancy, in the usual sense, isn't quite what I have in mind. 

Possession is probably closer to the general idea.

_The Exorcist_ doesn't seem to say exactly HOW Regan got Pazuzu to begin with. Did she swallow him like a parasite egg? Stroke the wrong statue with a fingertip in a museum? Break one of the Jehovah bitch's rules? And how the fuck do you request a specific possessor? My David is no demon, and I can't find anything about a humanlike being possessing a humanlike being. There's a subplot in Clive Barker's _Imajica_ that's slightly relevant, but it's as silent on HOW as everything else. The web gives me a million rabidly idiotic Christian pages, anecdotes, useless fucking commercials for Jesus and really bad sex and fashion sense. 

Multiple personality is a little better, quite a few seem to have tenants that were once independent humans who have died, and I suspect as usual that the vast majority are stupid or the wrong kind of crazy, with a few that are genuine mixed in and impossible to sort out. I can't imagine how to ask them how to do it on purpose, or how to kick out everyone but the new one. Typing "bodysnatching" brings me _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ movies, reviews, plastic figurines, resin kits, comic books, fan pages, and RPGs. 

Astral travel. Out of body experience. I've tried this and my few successes have gotten me about as far as my hallway until I seem to be snatched back. And that took me years. Teaching Fade to do it would probably take a century. And the few times someone seems to have had someone else try to get in while they're out, the original owner ousts them pretty fucking easily.

Catatonia. Amnesia. Coma. These seem to be demons of their own, darting in and out at will or through wounds. No consensus on what trauma reliably causes anything like these states and certainly no advice on how to do it on purpose.

Motherfucker, cocksucker, Hell and damnation. 

Trust humans to call it an information superhighway when it's more of a misinformation dirt road.

I light a cigarette. Seek and find my bowl and hit it. Frown at the screen while Fade sleeps behind me. 

I'm going to have to consult an expert. 

 

**ARCANA**

 

He's already outside. 

Lucifer is sitting in the back of Shelley, my porch light gleaming yellow on his oilspill coat but not making much dent in His hair. He's toying with something in His hands. I light two cigarettes from the stub of my old one and hand Him one. 

"How's Nathaniel?" I ask him. _How's the wife?_ Fat cats in suits, schmoozing. It makes me giggle. 

"Adjusting." Cigarette planted due-left trailing smoke from His Renaissance mouth. "How's the new one?" 

_Inadequate._ It's my turn to shrug. I know He already knows. 

He's holding a Tarot deck. I climb up with the ease of long, long habit to sit Indian-style beside him. I wish I'd brought a drink. "I have an idea, but I can't find any information on it. I thought I might ask You."

"Don't you owe Me enough favors already?" He's being very careful to mimic amusement on his inhuman face, so I'll know he's mostly joking. He's toying with the cards in His hands, and that strange-perspective flutter wings through my head. They're properly-sized tarot cards, about three times the size of a Bicycle deck. Too big to shuffle easily. But on Him they're playing-card small, and he can make those motherfuckers dance like he learned it in Vegas. Classic Waite pictures, but repainted and without the ugly plaid backs. He pours them in waterfalls from one hand to the next for a moment, flawlessly. 

A smile. Cutting, strange hollow-wooden thumps from the cards tapping the floor of Shel's cab. He pauses them in an impossibly thick fan before my face. "One card."

The one that will represent, me. 

I choose, without Him having to tell me to use my left hand. He ghosts the card out of my hand before I can see it and sets it face-down to one side. It looks extremely out of place, gleaming on her black rubber mat. 

"You have to ask questions, or the cards have nothing to answer."

Sometimes it's like the smartass has a will of its own. "What does my future hold?"

Lucifer smiles. A waterfall of the cards again, and three of them laid too fast for my eye to follow, all considerately turned so I can see them upright. The Devil. The Lovers. The Tower.

Tiny prickle of tears. 

"Where is..." My throat locks on his name. I lipsync David for Him, watch him shuffle the cards. Ten of swords. A man lying prone on a crypt, pierced with all ten. I hate that fucking card. Boy, do I ever know what it means.

I'm collapsing around my own gravity well. 

"I want him back. _I want him back._ "

I have never said this, not like this, not out loud. I've got my head in my hands when I finally manage to stop saying it. I'm not crying, or yelling, just quietly chanting this, over and over. _I want him back._ It's the refrain of everyone who has ever lost anyone. It's so simple. It's a revelation and a terrible pain and an epiphany to have words to put to it, after all this time. Such stupid, inadequate words.

He watches me do this, shuffling patiently, nodding only once. Three more cards, seeming to butterfly themselves from His hands, overlapping but not quite covering the first three. Death. Fool. Wheel of Fortune. "That isn't a question." 

Inhale. Exhale. Here is the dream of Egypt: 

"How can I bring him back?"

Three more. The Sun, the Moon, the World. 

And he picks up the first card, my avatar. I'm not at all surprised to see the Magician. Upside down. He does a gliding liquid something with one hand, makes them a flawless pile with the Magician covering them all. Takes a last drag off His cigarette and tosses it out into the sand.

"You can't."

I'm dumbfounded. Stricken. I don't believe him.

"Not alone, anyway." He lights another cigarette. "But I can help you." He exhales through his nose, watching what this does to my eyes. Then he smiles. "But you'll owe me."

"Anything."

Laughter. "Don't you want to know what you're agreeing to?"

"I don't care." But something happens in my throat that makes me have to swallow.

"A memory."

I squint at him. "Like, you want to take, one of mine?"

"No. I want to give you one. A new one."

 

He's incredibly gentle. He has to be. There's only one candle but that's too much light because I can see, too, much, of what He really looks like. Um. Not that it's revolting. It's the opposite. So there are things I'm feeling like doing that I don't, spaces in me I don't give Him because I'm afraid if I do they'll always be, His. 

He doesn't press the issue. 

Sorry about the metaphysics. 

I keep thinking about what _nephilim_ means. It's not just that he's tall, or so strong, or so very still.. He's everything _here_ isn't. His bones are long, and his hands are too big, and it's clearer why they use _beast_ to talk about Him and His, and it's clear why we made of them, angels. He's luminescent. His hair moves like a liquid; he's only holding me, lightly, those inhuman hands that make me think of Ents and aliens and make me feel like an, infant. My feet are tangled with His knees His hands are on my shoulders. 

I'm thinking about Salem and the Burning Times, and the phrase _consorting with the Devil._ I'm pretty fucking sure this counts as consorting. 

We're in Our Bed, meaning, as always, mine-and-David's, except I guess if anyone else is allowed to use it with me, it's Lucifer. Fade is out in the living room, on the couch very deeply and immovably asleep. Lucifer is folded in an L with his thighs along the bottom of the bed and his boots over the edge. He's, thrumming, in some easy low-vibration way, like there's machinery inside him beyond my comprehension. 

Close to my ear, he says "Light as a feather," meaning, I am stiff as a board. He's right. I try to relax on purpose and it mostly fails and He sighs. He smells like, matches. Like roses, like Eden, like sex and drugs and damnation. I no longer remember what I have agreed to, I only know that the Devil they warned me about has caught me and that the shame of what that makes me want is making me want to cry before he even starts in with the talons. If. What have I done? It's a long red string that leads into a labyrinth. 

"Shhhh." Too late. I sniffle and then He pulls me close, hugs me, reaches behind us and gropes around for my bedspread and drags it over us both. The gesture is so, human, and so somehow Daddylike that it makes the sniffles worse. A memory. I have no memories of this. That's what He wants as His price, to give me, this? I don't understand Him at all; I don't know if anyone can or ever will. 

But I love Him. With almost all of my heart.

He's spooning me. His tendrils are there and yet not-there, and I notice them first as tickles in my lungs. "Do you trust Me?" 

I nod. Sob once. Chew my lip and promise myself that I will not be an idiot. Something of His is stroking something of mine so, very close, to my spine. He's inside me without a wound. He's fucking me already, and for him this is pre-kissing petting. He pulls something, changes my channel, and I'm trancy and heavy and I think of Lady Stardust trying to sit up and failing, and I say "Don't hurt me," and proceed, to, hate myself, cry, etc. Fucking fuck. He only hugs me. He's hard against me. I wish He'd kill me, because I won't be me when I come back from this. He kisses the back of my head, nuzzles me. "Never." Then a smile I feel through the tendrils, like a flare of a new, color. "Unless you asked Me to."

"Fuck you." 

He's in my ear quantum-fast. "Not, quite."

I think of Fade, and of stories, and the first real deep hard hot pink pang of _want_ does that stomach-dart thing inside me. And then He ruins it by doing something that really tickles, somewhere in the region of my spleen, and it unfastens most of the last of my fear. I kick at him with feeble humanoid feet, laughter moving me around Him, heels thudding into his shins. He's immovable. It makes me feel, safe, and I have never felt, safe. And I fear it like I fear heroin, and for exactly the same reason, but it's too late. Fuck it. 

"Fuck me, then."

I just said it. That was the only way I'd ever do it, faster than my fucking, whatever, could stop me from it. Mostly I think I fear He's going to-betray me with this, somehow. Use it against me. I can't explain it.

He kisses the back of my head again. The tickling subsides into a petting, and He's so very long, and warm, against me, and so very..soothing, inside me. It's like having someone massage you, I suppose, only, everywhere, and with fingers that aren't quite solid. Frictionless. But there's more to it than that, something that makes me think of chakras, places He can touch that send quickwaves of something through me that changes my breath. And there's always this pulling, underneath it all. Falling. I think, He's pulling me down closer to where He really is.

So He can reach me better.

I have time to, inhale, and his long long hand f o l d s over most of my face, really, the very edge of his palm enough to muffle my mouth. Yet he's as narrow as I am. He's built to, fly. 

He says, _Let go,_ and I do. He snatches me out, catches me up in all that, web. Then we are, flying. 

I'm built for it too.

Channel surfing at warp speeds through every possible configuration of Him inside me. In some of them we're farther underground than any light can ever reach; in some we're in a forest torn by wind, surrounded by the tattoo of drums and the flicker of fire, stone table under my back. I slideshow past worlds where he's got me tentacle pinned and places where neither of us is anything like human, where we seem to be chemicals interacting with one another. 

He laughs in my ear, way back on a tiny distant Earth. He's older than anything. He's..vast. He could crush me with a thought, and in some of them He does.

In the sky of one of these worlds there is a pylon. An obelisk. There is a boy pinioned there with two iron stakes through him on either side, through his ribcage just below his shoulders. He has dark hair that covers his face. It could be me, or any number of my muses. 

Things I can't understand are flying around him, tearing him apart, are rebuilding him, taking off everything from the ribcage down except a gleaming tail of spine, eating him empty with a blurring harvest of beaks. They take the bones, pare them clean of flesh, nest the bones together into new shapes until they are spread out like skeleton wings. 

I recognize the glyph now: _ba._ The soul-bird. But I still don't know whose.

And then they've finished, and there's a great closing of talons and beating of wings, and they draw the stakes free The _ba_ falls, is caught by the flock, nudged skyward. His wings beat, though they should rattle like bone, and then they are all airborne, flying out of my field of view and leaving only the obelisk higher than anything. 

I thought this was the, initiation, the sex or the whatever the fuck He wanted to, give me, but I was wrong.

This was merely Him sifting through my files settling on a _menu_ for what was to follow.

He kisses me, in Our Bed, in the dark. 

He says, "This one?"

 

**PSYCHOTHERAPY**

 

Days roll by.

I live at the computer. 

I pack a new bowl, light a new cigarette and leave it burning in the ashtray. Search for _psyops_ and _psychological torture_ and CIA mind control. Find a shitload of pages with too many pictures of the big-eyed aliens for me to tolerate and a few interesting points on sleep deprivation. 

Where is the string that Theseus laid?

Maybe I'm Theseus. Maybe that's the problem.

 

Fade becomes hollow-eyed. Unreasonable. Sometimes I wake him up to fuck him; sometimes he follows me ghostycolored and silently pleading until I fuck him. He nibbles on cheese when I let him; drinks milk, pretends to ignore my gleeful tales of milking machines and poor calves with their stomachs cut out for rennet. 

I leave the PETA videos on repeat when I’m not using the computer. Run through my sadly short supply of bloodthirsty movies that don’t suck and start over at the beginning. Leave the best of my bloodthirsty books in neat little piles on end tables to help poison the well of his useless mind. The best of those books, of course, is on my computer minimized under the blurry maximized window of screaming lambs and howling cows and laughing red-Pollacked men brandishing knives.

His computer is about what I expected. It’s so much newer than mine that it’s damn hard to navigate, and so much faster than mine that it makes me want to throw it at him. Dropdowns in the search engines populate with everything from _animal cruelty_ to _zoo_ with an interesting sprinkling of _Cenobite, genocide, rape fiction, guro_ and _splatterpunk_ for color. 

There are journals that intermittently span from middleschool angst to pretentious little dissertations on the nature of evil and how sex and violence are related and why Deathstyle is interesting but overrated and “too commercial.” That last makes me throw in one of four bootlegs of their videos and leave it on. It also makes me hate Fade just another ounce or two. I know what he doesn’t like about Deathstyle. I have nothing but disdain for people who hate mirrors that work too well. 

There’s a scrapbook fluttering with clippings that I page through. Missing children, Dahmer, Bundy. A PETA demonstration that results in a bunch of arrogant vegans getting thrown the fuck in jail, where presumably they will be provided with shitty vegetarian meals in accordance with their shitty little beliefs.

Nothing erases that, adoration, in his eyes. Nothing yet, anyway. He wants to hate me but I’ve already got the hooks in much too deep.

After a while he’s used to my spasms of exceptional weirdness. I can sit on the couch with a bottle of rum at five am, watching the same video over and over, drooling, and he’ll occasionally bring me a damp towel, or ice in a glass. I find myself becoming more and more odd, twitching and looming up at him in hallways, bored even after I get the ghost of his version of that fear smell. He just looks at me with those eyes that don’t have enough color to name.

Is it that I have his...consent, that I don’t like?

I stop going to work. They don’t call and neither does the temp agency. I return the favor. When I run out of cash I go to an ATM in Fade’s sunglasses. Nobody seems to notice except for a truckload of tubby rednecks at the red light who kindly inform me I’m a _freeeeeeak_ and sling a beer bottle in my general direction the second the redlight changes so they can floor it and escape my wrath. As if I have a bazooka cleverly hidden in the pocket of my pants. The bottle shatters on the curb an entire parking lot away from me. Nice throw, dolts. I wonder why you’re getting drunk in a ten-year-old Toyota instead of playing major-league football. Maybe if I stood leaning _into_ your fucking window you could hit me, but I doubt it. 

My wallet will no longer snap around the cash in it. My wrists and knees have stopped aching now that I no longer spend most of my life leaning over a conveyor belt making someone else rich, making barely enough to make rent. Under my black dress pants there’s black raspberry lipstick in my pubic hair. These three facts feel like a victory over Them and Their kind.

When I get home The Novel is no longer minimized. And the cursor is blinking at the end of the document. 

It took him long enough. It’s not like it’s _hidden._ I save the Novel directly on my desktop so that I can open it quickly no matter how fucked up I am. A line or an edit or an idea might wander through my head at any time, day or night, and it might be gone by the time I remember where the fuck Word is and how to open a document through it.

Then-and I don’t know what makes me do it-I get the bright idea to check my Internet window and see if anything new and wonderful has been added to _my_ dropdown windows. I nail it on the first one; all I do is type _jamie_ and the little scroll gives me _jamie jacksonville florida missing._ I check Nathaniel. Ditto, for both Nathaniel and Nathan. Ditto, for _body mausoleum Georgia Egypt._

I close the windows. Stare at the marquee screensaver that says OPEN ME in a drippy red font. Wander over to stare at Fade, drag back his blanket. He’s wearing the corset I gave him, and nothing else. He opens his colorless eyes.

“Morning.”

He blinks. He’s, wary. He remembers. 

I sit down and light my breakfast cigarette. “Did you like it?”

I give him a cigarette to see what he does with it. He lights it. He still sucks at smoking them, but he tries whenever I hand him one. I’ve paid attention, and none of mine are ever missing, which means he still isn’t inhaling correctly. 

“You’re, really good. “ He’s not looking me in the eye. “But you might get sued for using real missing kids. You should probably change the names.”

Now, that’s cute. I’m going with lie, though as far as strategic lying goes that’s a pretty good one. Still, if he’s ever going to convince anyone he’s going to have to learn that eye contact thing. I decide to see where he’s going with this. An escape attempt would be a lot of fun to punish. 

“That wouldn’t be as, amusing.” 

We smoke.

Then Fade adds, “You have a very, vivid, imagination.”

Smirk. “Thank you.”

 

He’s particularly well-behaved that day. Later that night we’re watching one of the idiotic _Traces of Death_ videos and he puts his face in my lap all by himself and proceeds to give me the most complicated blowjob his tiny little mind can conjure. It’s really darling. His cheekbones are so much better, now. It suits him, this new hollowness. This new near-insanity. 

After, we’re tangled on the couch and he has his head on my shoulder. He says, “Did all of that happen to you? The kid stuff, I mean.”

Yes, genius. The rest of it, too. “Fuck you.”

He makes of that what he wants to, nuzzles me with his face. “I’m sorry.”

Quiet.

“Did you really see the Devil? Or was that, a metaphor, for…?”

Quiet. I stifle the urge to smack him. 

Brush of his eyelashes and that brittle hair against my neck. “You’d never, really, hurt me, would you?”

 

Oh, Fade. You cheating, cheating boy. You sneaking, lying _spying_ boy, with your smell like one of Them and your magazine house like one of Them and your money like one of Them. You traitor boy, with your scarless skin and your darling little _causes._

Were you going to save the world from me? 

Who’s going to save you?

 

I handcuff him in the kitchen floor by opening the cabinets under the sink and locking a dog chain around the pipes and the plank of wood between the two doors. I test it first, yanking as hard as I can, even kicking at it in various ways quite a few times with full-leg slams of both feet. Nothing. He watches me with that same miserable determination, lets me pull him down to lie in the floor and lock his hands over his head. 

By the time I come back he’ll be in something worse than discomfort and less than agony from the hard floor and the strange crooked positions of being crowded between the counter and the island stove. I have the mercy to leave a plastic bottle with an accordion straw built in filled with water for him. It makes me think of hamster cages. 

I figure out the ancient videocamera, bungee-cord the fucking thing to fit on the tripod (it needs some piece I’m lacking) and set it up too far away for him to kick it over to watch him with that one black eye so I don’t miss anything while I’m gone.

 

Back to the computer to stare at the cursor, blinking at the end of the novel. Fade squirms and thumps a little to remind me that he would really like to be uncuffed now. I grab the first thing on my desk I don’t currently need-a little bamboo easel I use to hold up notebooks for typing-and throw it at him. He subsides.

Writing is weird; sometimes you have no clue what you’re going to write until the words start to roll. When it works, really works, Raistlin-in-his-magick works, you learn things you didn’t know you knew, say things you never knew you could. 

I hit the bowl, watch the cursor blink, hit the bowl again. 

Start typing.

 

Mealtimes are a fuck of a lot more fun than they used to be. It’s delightful to have someone to cook for, company while you eat. It’s delightful to watch him push these little scraps of dead flesh around on his plate. I’m positive the smell drives him crazy, but he’ll no longer even try to eat any. Usually he’s in tears before he even sits down, not big production-number sobbing, just overflow like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. 

Being a carnivore seems to suit me perfectly. I’d have said it was pretty much impossible for to lose any weight-if I get sick I drop dangerously low, dangerously quick-and I don’t seem to lose much in actual numbers on the scale, but the absence of sugar and carb peels what miniscule body fat I have away, leaves me feeling sleek and lean and polished, clear-headed. My cheekbones are astounding in the mirror. I walk my fingers up my ribcage, investigate the graceful concavity that makes my ass to my thighs a new predator plane. I feel lighter, fiercer, dangerously focused and impossible to defeat. And Gandhi is right-eating meat does make you bloodthirsty. More werewolf metaphors that will land in the Novel somewhere. 

I get two more combination locks, duplicate the toolshed rig on the front and back doors. I take the rabbit-ears that make my television pick up any channels at all and lock them in the shed. I change every clock in the house to a different time, take the telephones out.

I paint the windows black so not even the sunlight will tell him how long he’s been here. He watches me listlessly, one of my books on Chikatilo in his hand divided with one finger, unread. The clock in my bedroom is right within half an hour or so. I set it to wake me at strange times so I can wake Fade at strange times with shaking or throatfucking or steaming platters of meat that make him call me a bastard and hide his face in the couch cushions. 

I make him snort meth until he’s wired for sound, order him to clean the house, watch him tornado around with spoiled rich brat ignorance of how the fuck to clean anything, a blur of shaking hands and grinding teeth. It doesn’t really help. Now he’s just an idiot at top speed.

I watch him crash through the camera lens, zoom in on his trembling mouth and wounded eyes while he’s begging me for either more meth or a downer because he says he’s too busy to sleep and too exhausted to keep thinking. 

He still doesn’t realize he’s been kidnapped. I think he thinks at the end of this pledge-week he’ll be welcomed into whatever club I’m the only member of. 

Fade is not as round as he was. He has straight lines now, delicious blades of shinbone and shoulder. I film him sleeping. Crying. Jerking off with his nails newly painted crimsonblack and his mouth painted too whore-red to suit him. I throw in a tape or two of him between Deathstyle marathons. 

He pretends to ignore it. I can see it ruining how he imagines himself. I turn it up until it won’t go any louder. 

**DAMAGE (DONE)**

 

I bring Fade cornflakes and milk with banana and strawberry in, in a punch-sized bowl. His gratitude is pretty obscene. The tape of that is fantastic-he’s eating as quickly as he can, sobbing, with milk dripping from his chin. And thanking me when he has to pause for breath.

Then I don’t let him eat or sleep for the next four days. 

I keep him in the floor for most of that time, with a blindfold and headphones taped to his head. The music is arranged to alternate at random, with bursts of sudden patternless noise and cockteasing periods of quiet. Underneath all of that at all times is a subliminal hypnosis tape meant to cause spontaneous astral travel. 

It sounds cooler than it is-it’s two tape decks set to play two tapes each in loop, into a pair of those headphones that look like they’re for air-traffic controllers to block out external sounds. It’s all thrift-store and electrical tape. I made the tapes with the same decks, recording two onto one and then recording that onto a new one until I had the resulting almost-unlistenable mindscrambling mess. The setup looks ridiculous, but it seems to be working just fine. I shuffle the order of the tapes now and then to make sure he doesn’t memorize the flow.

The drugs are the other vital piece of technology for this, ritual. I feed him any psychedelic I can get my hands on in approximately medium doses, with sedatives or stimulants in between, depending on whether I want to raise his volume or turn him off. Ha. I’m careful here, to, to keep no schedule, which isn’t all that hard when his prescription depends on what I can find on the black market on any given day. I try to make sure he only has two serious things in his system at any time, which probably isn’t working very well, since I generally have at least three in _my_ system at every given time. I smoke constantly and taste most of what I give him and drink more than I ever, ever should. I grab sleep when I can and use meth when I can’t and spend days trying to drive him insane. 

It doesn’t take long.

 

I leave a platter of meat where he can smell it, but not reach it. Watch him struggle not to struggle. Watch him break, pleading with the camera. From _I’m not willing to do this_ to begging me for meat in less than a month. So good.

I have to cushion around his head with pillows, now, or sometimes he’ll slam it into the floor on purpose. A helmet would be better but it’d interfere with the view.

The tape is hours old by the time I get around to watching it. 

I go back in and put a new tape in the camera and take off his blindfold, push the plate with my foot until he can reach it. I tell him what a good boy he was. I have to keep it so cold in here so he can wear all that leather, so the meat is probably fine. It’s a deli platter. It’s meant to sit out at a party all night anyway. 

Eating and crying at the same time is unbelievably hot. 

I cover his eyes again, uncuff him after he finally stops. Pull his hair to make him crawl on his knees a while, to watch him aching and stiff and hysterically terrified of whatever I’m getting ready to do to him. I fuck his throat for a while. He never does get sick. He finally adapted. Flicker of being proud of him again.

I turn him loose. Watch him crawl to the sink by feel, pull himself up, turn on the faucet for water. Check the camera. After he drinks he goes back to his knees with the blindfold turned towards me like a sunflower. He waits for me to tell his future. 

It’s not as easy as it sounds. I have to utterly break his mind without doing any serious damage to his body. So I have to cram an entire childhood of abuse into a matter of weeks-carefully. Hence the vitamins and the reason I’ve been afraid to, say, take a belt to him yet. I don’t know if I could restrain myself. Chemicals are usually the answer to a problem like this. 

I snort Klonopin, to make me lazy and clumsy and slightly less, bloodthirsty. Line after line of weird sweetness. It makes him cringe himself smaller, shake. He thinks I’m doing that much speed. Maybe I should, ha. I leash him by that gorgeous hair and walk him to the kitchen table and make him lean over one of the chairs. I take off the fur and the pants, leave the boots and the corset. Fantastic. He’s pornographic. Better, there’s a large and stupid mirror behind the table that was there when I moved in, presumably to trick the eye into believing the kitchen is less of a hole. I take his hand and move it so he feels the glass, so he knows I can see his face. Perfect. 

I take off my belt, and realize that without it my pants will not stay up. I manage to take them off, which I’m glad he cannot see because it probably looks ridiculous. Somewhere in the process I wander off in search of alcohol and that’s how this begins. I intend to take just a shot or two to assist the Klonopin but I tilt it too far too fast and then I think, just one more. 

Three more later I’ve been hitting Fade for a while. 

He’s crawled and screamed and covered and cringed most of the way into the living room and I finally throw the whole belt at him and the buckle clips him in a point of bone on his left arm and leaves him unable to do anything but hold his elbow and writhe. I pull him back into the kitchen by his ankles, leave him in a ball on the linoleum. I start raking through drawers looking for something more satisfying to hit him with. 

Everything I pick up is too small (spoons, etc) or too solid (sharpeners and great big cooking utensils) or sharp (everything) and I’m making an unhappy growl, dropping half of what I pick up, throwing discards into the sink to watch him cringe at each varied noise. I had no idea I owned so many knives, screwdrivers, pairs of scissors, pointy little things without names. I suppose they’ve been finding their way into my pockets all my life. 

I settle on a blunt light handful and sit on the floor with him and experiment with pushing each one up his ass. Mostly it’s all kinds of handles, strange oblongs, none of it very big. I think it’s the idea of it that’s making him howl like that, more than any actual serious pain. Though it’s probably not comfortable without lube. He has a surprisingly violent reaction to small-dull things, like the flat end of a chopstick. Something about the, delicacy, of how that touches him inside makes him scream and scream in something like horror. 

I spend a very long time fucking around with a thing that I think is for lobster, just a piece of metal with a tiny flattened hook at one end. It’s just pointy enough to leave deep red marks that will be scratches tomorrow, but too dull to puncture very far even if I stab at him like I mean it. I have to wrap my legs around him. He can’t struggle at that pitch for very long. He’s exhausted much sooner than I am, too worn out to flinch, limp and devastated. 

I tell him I’m going to eat him, prod him with the bident-tines of a grilling fork. It’s much too satisfyingly, heavy, much too solid, and I slide it across the floor to get it out of my reach. Now I’m weaponless. I push my fingers inside him. There are scratches I can feel; stroking them with the saltsweat of a fingertip makes him cry out in an amusing new frustrated key. No, damn it. 

I drag open the fridge over his head, dig through the shelves overflowing with halfempty bottles. I have a vague conception of what I need; anything from cooking oil to butter to shortening, but what I come up with is much better. 

It’s hot sauce. I try to pour some into my palm and it oozes out at the rate of roughly one drop per eon. I rip the little plastic dropper off with my teeth. I’m laughing and laughing and it makes Fade whine and whine. He doesn’t know what I have-still blindfolded-but he knows if I find it that funny it’s going to be bad. I’m clumsy and violent and too sedated to care. I miss and leave an orange-red splotch on the small of his back before I manage to coordinate him and me and get my fingers back in. 

Nothing happens for a second or three, and I’m about to conclude that I’ve made some drunken mistake about capsicum being the same in hot sauce and Mace. Then Fade, changes, as though a wave of sudden-paralysis slammed through him like a solar flare. Chemicals are usually the answer to problems like this, ha. It’s magnificent, and he has _no idea what it is_ so there’s this fabulously real edge of panic to all this agony. 

It’s like haiku, this strange new no-wounding rule. I’m learning all _kinds_ of innovative things. The tiniest motion of my fingers seems to quadruple the pain, which makes me determined to get most of my hand inside him. I need to soundproof this house, because I don’t think I tested anything as loud as he’s getting. I upend what’s left of the bottle all over my hand, his back. I manage all four fingers and half of my palm before he loses consciousness. 

 

Now it’s time for Reality # 2. 

I put a shop towel soaked in industrial-grade chloroform very close to his nose for a twenty-second count, pick up and drop his foot a few times to make sure he’s pretty out. Check. I risk leaving him for a few minutes to take the world’s fastest shower. He hasn’t so much as twitched when I come back. I sponge him off, put him back in the leather pants and a pair of clean underwear from his backpack, so cute, a clean black tshirt of mine. I spare him the corset for now. He’s slightly too heavy for me to carry, but if I haul under his arms I can drag him into the living room and get him onto the couch. I throw a blanket over him. Smoke a bowl. Throw in _A Clockwork Orange_ for background noise. Work on The Novel.

 

I give him two hours or so. When his breathing changes I pick up the phone on my desk, shake his shoulder. “Fade. What do you want on your pizza?”

He comes fully awake with the fullbody cringe I’ve been trying to PTSD into him for almost a month now. Squints at me, hands patting himself, memory making him pant in delayed-reaction terror. He finds no wounds, sees me squinting at him quizzically, drops it a notch or two. “…what?”

“Piz-za.” Slowly, and loudly, like he’s a bit retarded. I grin at him. “You stoner. Four times I’ve asked you. What do you want on your pizza? Do you just want a fucking veggie one?”

“…yeah…” He tries and fails to sit up, tries and succeeds. I dial what I vaguely remember is the pizza place and order some things. 

He hugs himself, rocking. When I hang up he’s still staring at me. “You….raped me?”

I’m so good at looking puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

“In the kitchen….you put things inside me….”

“Uh…yeah, I did, Fade. My fingers and my tongue and my dick. Before that you spent most of the night hanging onto the fucking pipes under the sink. That was really good acid. You’re a fucking buzzkill, you know that?” Smile to let him know I’m kidding. I’m saving the Novel. 

“…we were, tripping?” No wonder he’s confused. We haven’t had any acid. He’s had E and and a lot of meth and a lot of alcohol and no REM sleep and been half-starved for the last three weeks, is all. 

“You kept moaning about being hungry. I had this deli tray but you’d scream if I got near you with it. I finally put it on the fucking floor and left your dumb ass alone.”

Inhale. Exhale. He holds his probably aching head, still rocking. That’s enough like what he remembers to be scaring the shit out of him. “I feel, like I’m losing my mind…”

I pack the bowl and hand it to him. He takes it. 

He asks me if he can shower, and I laugh like this is a dumb question and tell him of course he can, and that there are clean towels under the sink. The delivery-guy comes while he’s out. 

When Fade comes back he doesn’t look twice at the finely chopped mushrooms sprinkled into the rest of the vegetable horde on his pizza. He eats like he’s ravenous, and I see him looking at me sideways, like he knows this is supposed to come with gratitude. Ha. He doesn’t say anything. In half an hour or so I’ll knock him out again and wake him up in fullblown trip back in Reality #1. Repeat as needed.

 

**NECROMANCY**

 

He’s as ready as he’ll ever be. 

He’s in his usual place in the kitchen floor, arms cuffed over his head, watching me the way you stare at the guy who checks your harness before the roller coaster ride. “Are you starting, now?” That fucking stoner giggle. “To kill me, I mean.”

“I started weeks ago.” When you met me. It was too late then already. Much, much too late.

He can feel me thinking that. All of that. That makes a shudder of....something, real, move through his skin, and he’s quiet for once. 

He doesn’t get it and then you see the lightbulb flicker and finally stay on. It’s horribly like fucking with the switch for an old fluorescent until you hold the bulb and the switch just right just long enough........and that makes me want to.....laugh? He swallows. I put my hand on his throat and tell him to do it again. If I look at him in pieces, I’ve just discovered, it helps immensely. Jaw, collarbone, wrist, knuckles, ribcage under a Chemlab shirt. Well, that’s what he is, isn’t it? A collage of my, tastes. He’s just missing a few, all-important pieces. A brain, a heart, the nerve.

Deathstyle is playing Jacksonville in less than two weeks. 

I’m going to ask David if he wants to go with me. 

I have the syringe loaded and ready. I wipe the inner crook of Fade’s elbow with an alcohol swab. I’ve cleaned from my fingertips to my elbows, but I don’t like even latex gloves between me and skin. He’s narrow enough for me to tourniquet him more or less with my hand. He obligingly makes anemone-fists, openclosed openclosed, and he doesn’t flinch when the needle punctures skin and vein in my first try, draws up a reassuring splash of red. He’s crying, and I say “It’s anesthetic,” to soothe him a little. 

I put the headphones back on him. Settle him on his back with pillows wherever he seems to be too bony for the floor. I start music for my half of this ritual-the David list. Light candles, turn off lights, light a joint and hit it. I hold it for him to hit it and he does, watching me, accusingly, shiny-eyed. His eyelids are starting to droop, and I fear I’ve given him too much. I put in the one tape I haven’t yet used-the trigger-and press play. The next time I offer him a hit he doesn’t take it, and I shotgun him instead. He, cooperates, but he feels, very distant.

It’s working. 

I open my juju bag. It’s a black silk drawstring bag I made to cover the Ziploc inside. David’s tights, the bracelet, and a snip of the sheets from Our Bed along an edge where it wouldn’t show. Clove cigarette stubs that I’d stolen from ashtrays after he left them. I inhale.

I close my eyes, and start to build a hologram in my head. 

I think it’s _this_ I’ve been training my imagination for, not stories or lies. Perfection is vital. 

I dig through every memory of David I have. I watch him sit in the chair with the broken arm at his apartment, roll those lovely eyes, fuss with that ex-pageboy of hair. I flicker through lying on Shel’s hood with him with her windows down so we can hear the stereo. Trying and failing to pass him the joint. Watching him smoke a clove instead and self-deprecate about how he knows what he wants to do with his life but LeClaire is already doing it, so he’s going to be a photographer instead. He walks up to me from three years ago, says over my shoulder at the bar, “Is this too Deathstyle?” as my only warning before I turn around to find him wearing the _Blade Runner_ line like a blindfold in red makeup across his eyes. Him across the bar from me, over-the-top lipsynching _don’t expect too much from me, you’re touching nothing._ Stealing his drink when he was away to take a token sip on the offchance he’s left DNA in the glass. To put my mouth where his mouth had been. Watching him dance, eons of that. I’m crying, but I don’t move. If I lose concentration I’ll have to start all over. 

I hear his bootheels first.

He says, “Don’t open your eyes,” and I clap my hands over my face just in time. 

He scared me half to death. You’ll understand that joke when you re-read this book and you’ll wish you could smack me for it. 

“Why not?”

More steps. He’s _right beside me._ “Because I don’t think you’ll be able to see me, and, uh, if you don’t, you might, drop it.” And I feel him touch me, set his hand on the top of my head and leave it there for a second like he doesn’t know what to do next before he, pets me. I’m shaking. I never in my life had any urge as great as the one I have now to reach up and grab his wrist, pull him down and get my arms and legs around him, my teeth in him, my dick in him. Never ever let him go again. 

Hands plus face is good. I have my palms crammed so hard into my eyes I can see those colorbursts. 

“I don’t get a pentagram or anything?” He’s teasing me. “No, like, line of salt?”

“Everything I read those kinds of things seemed to be for, keeping things out, or keeping things in. I don’t want to do either.”

Silence, in which I’m sure he’s doing the half-rolled eyes that he does when he’s thinking. A rustle that has to be a shrug. “I dunno. You’re the expert. All I know about magic is bullshit from Dungeons and Dragons when I was like, twelve.”

A grin at the thought of my beautiful geek carrying dice and little rulebooks around. SO cute. “I’m no expert.”

“What do we do now?”

Uh. Huh. “I think I’ve made you too….solid….I’m going to try to like, imagine you getting, ghost-ier, transparent….. floating over…” I giggle. I can’t help it. It sounds fucking ridiculous when you try to put it into words Most magick does.

“Okay.” Footsteps. The hand on my head trails away. “Should I just, wait?”

“Maybe if you try to imagine the same thing while I do, that would help. Or you can just wait.”

Quiet. “…starting, now?”

I’d started already. “Now is good.”

Quiet. 

It’s too B-movie for me to manage exactly what I described. Instead I try to turn him into a slow spiral cloud of, plasma, something like what blacklight does to smoke particles. I hear him say “Erik,” and then there’s silence, and a sense of electricity, motion. I try to _see_ this storm surrounding Fade, subsiding into him, closing around him.

Something from, Fade. An inhale, the drag of a foot. I take my hands away from my face, risk a look. Fade is….vibrating…..his eyes are open but there’s no one home, yet….his spine is, arching…

Something is, wrong.

There’s a lot of kicking. I suppose I’m watching a, seizure. There’s a sudden fucking, slam, like something impossibly large has hit Fade. It throws him over on his side so hard I’m afraid he’s broken at least one wrist. Then a gargling scream that I wish to fuck I could forget. It was not pretty at all. I promise. 

A cough. Another, “Erik?” sounding….off…slurred….drunken. 

Damaged.

Rattle of the handcuff chains. I crawl over, muttering _fuck fuck fuck_ and pull off the headphones. 

Something is so, fucking, wrong. 

The face I turn towards me only moves on one side. The eye on the right side is mostly, brown, but it’s not very sci-fi. It looks more like a spreading, bruise. What’s funny, or not, about this, for those of you who don’t know, is that LeClaire wears a white, contact lens, sometimes, to get this Bowie-effect, which is pretty much how this looks, since the other side is all Fade and all stillness. Vacant. 

Half of the mouth says, “…crooked….” and I know that it’s my David. And there’s another, deeper, cough. A violent palsy of trembling in one hand that jitters the handcuffs again. 

I say something stupendously helpful like _stop it stop it,_ chewing my fingers. I keep trying to touch him and keep pulling my hands away. It’s grotesque. It makes me think of Siamese twins or of those horrible fucked-up clones of Ripley in whichever Alien movie. It makes me want to scream and scream.

He says, “… ’thaniel…told, me…” and that’s all he says. That spasm moves from the hand down into everything, They shake and shake in my arms, urinate in a warm puddle between us. Then it stops, like a fuse has finally blown. 

Now both the eyes are empty. The body is breathing. There’s a pulse, on both sides of the neck. And that’s all. 

“…Fade?”

Nothing.

“David?”

Nobody answers me. 

I take the handcuffs off. Kiss the half of the mouth that moved. 

I wait a while, but nothing happens. It occurs to me that maybe Fade can’t get back. I try to imagine a silver cord, trailing down from this Fade to drag his soul through Hell like, oh, a boat hauling a net. Ha. Fair enough, whatever works. I imagine the boat hauling the net in, the cord getting shorter and shorter and pulling Fade back up to intersect with what’s left of his body. Something snaps through him hard enough to shake us both. Fade opens his one colorless eye and clutches at me with one hand. He coughs out monosyllables, lots of _g_ and _h_ and _ng,_ and then starts to cry.

 

There’s a noise that makes no noise, outside. I slide away from Fade, leave him twitching on the floor, panicked. Cops. A neighbor. A friend, if I still have any of those.

The combination lock over the front door rattles, faster and faster, flies open and hits the carpet with a muffled little janglethud. The bolt turns itself; the chain slides in the groove and falls free, swinging in a shortening arc. The knob turns and Lucifer steps in, crosses my living room with slow heavy steps like there’s a chore waiting for Him in the kitchen with me.

He sighs, standing with one shoulder leaning against Bowie. Looks down at Fade like it’s a mess someone left in the walkway. “I wish you’d told me you meant to use _this_ one.”

“Didn’t you _know?_ ” This is shouting, but I’m too horrified to care that I’m shouting at Him. Both hands in my hair like I have to hold my skull together. “Can’t you read my fucking mind?”

“I can, but I will not. Not the way you mean, unless I’m in it, or I have very clear permission.” He drops to one knee, coat settling around him making me think of wings, peers into Fade’s eyes, observing that strange stained interrupted change. 

He opens Fade’s mouth, strokes inside with one finger, tastes it. “Not compatible. A little like organ rejection.” He touches Fade’s forehead like He’s checking for fever, does something invisible that makes Fade try and fail to scream. He frowns, does something else that makes Fade melt into a tensionless still curve on the linoleum. 

“You’re going to have to find one that smells like the one you lost. Tastes of him, makes you dream of him. A perfect one. You’ve tried to put him into a suit too small. This one has...split at the seams.” 

He closes Fade’s mouth, pats his head like a veterinarian soothing a frightened animal. Fade vibrates, gargles something in his throat, thumps one hand into the linoleum and grabs a pointless handful of rag rug, eyes permanently leaking tears. 

He’s _in_ there. That’s the worst part. I can see Fade trapped behind those mismatched eyes, and it’s hideous. I’m glad I don’t like him or I would feel terrible for his sake in addition to my own. 

“Can you fix him?“ My voice is all wrong. Too small. I sound to myself like I must've when I was single-digit young. 

“No.” Without a second’s hesitation. 

“Then...what do I _do_ with him?”

Lucifer shrugs. “Drop him at a police station and they’ll put him in an asylum. Nothing can be done. He won’t survive like that for very long. Months, at the longest.” 

I sit down on the floor with a thump, still holding my head. Stare at what’s left of Fade in the silence . “Are they _both_ in there?”

“Not right now. Just the original. “ He sits beside me. 

“Will that, half….” A noise I don’t realize is a sob. “..rot?” 

“Of course not.”

“I did it all _wrong._ ”

“No. You put in the engine, perfectly. You just chose the wrong…model. Everything else went pretty well.” He rises, takes my hands away from my face, holds them, thumbs soothing at my palms. “This was a trial run.”

I’m horrified by that until I realize he’s right. 

Later that night I’m on the couch, masturbating to Deathstyle. It’s lonely without Fade pretending to ignore this. I’ve dragged the half-dozen scavenged speakers I use for the TV around till the sound seems to emanate from inside me, till I can feel Max’s voodoo bassline in my teeth and feel LeClaire’s razorblade voice from cock to cerebral cortex. 

So good.

I’m in mourning. Again. Still. I’m mourning not getting my way. I’m mourning the one-too-many Deathstyle tickets sitting under my bed with David’s bracelet wrapped around them. I’m mourning how fucking much I wanted to give that back to him. I’m mourning the fact that I didn't grab his wrist, catch him, keep him. 

The kitchen: a weak housecat noise, rustling, scuffing. I don’t hear it because of the music, but I know it’s there. It usually picks up during the few seconds of silence between videos. Crash, bang, and a lull, and the wet sound of my hand on my dick and the scudding little arc that he can make with the side of one combat boot against the kitchen tile, so faint even the air conditioner will muffle it, so far away I have to strain to hear it. He’s probably squirming for all he’s worth, right about now. 

Crash that I feel more than hear. I ignore it. He’s kicking the side of the stove. Harmless.

LeClaire on screen in a white wedding dress, rending the veil free of his long black hair. He makes me deeply happy in a gleeful way. Maybe someday I’ll give him a present.

More faint impacts through the floor. I think of him uselessly slamming those elegant bare feet against the side of the counter, over and over. I masturbate faster, the pleasure climbing in that plateau-change rush that makes me hiss and growl and kick and moan and shudder. 

LeClaire onscreen, tatters of white satin hanging around his waist, chest and teeth bared, fingernails leaving darkening red trails in a slash over one nipple. He’s unspeakable, fallen-angel gorgeous, and he’s too much for me and I close my eyes. He has a lot of David’s birdness.

And suddenly, I know exactly, exactly what I’m going to do with Fade. 

It makes me come in my hand, eyes wide-open in wonder at how magnificently evil this idea is. 

LeClaire gnashes his teeth and twitches and snarls and I laugh and laugh and laugh. 

Sudden silence from the kitchen; he must be able to hear me over the music. 

It’s going to be epic and I might even get away with it. Underneath the beautiful, flawless,   
eureka fucking plan is a growing climbing sense of, uh, Antichristness...glee...and a revelation that I just do not want to try to even belong to the human, world, at all, that I don’t want any more life that has anything to do with them, that none of it has ever had anything for me, and that this, does. 

There’s some blazing unholy fucking magick inside it. 

I lick my hand, hug myself and LeClaire and I twitch and gnash our teeth and drool and snarl along with him, celebrating, practicing.

 

I buy meth, more weed, ask for DMT or ketamine or PCP and get a blank look and then a laugh. I ask secondary and tertiary suppliers I haven’t spoken to in months. Nobody has any or knows anyone who has any, but if I find any they’d appreciate it if I’d let them know, and would I like some X?

Lucifer. Damn it. Please. I hate asking Him for help, but sometimes I have no idea what else to do. I suspect that fully half my “prayers” are drug related. Ha.

I go to the Gainesville club. Fade elects to stay home handcuffed in the kitchen floor. I sit in the darkest possible corner because I no longer look sane no matter what I do with makeup or sunglasses. The hood helps a little. Ten minutes later a kid I’ve never seen that I never see again sits beside me. He has a pentagram painted onto the arm of his leather jacket. He has exactly what I need.

Two weeks is not as long as you’d think. Fade gets marginally better. He can walk, though he still drags his right side, and that side of his face doesn’t move very well when he talks. Fortunately he doesn’t talk much. Sometimes gibberish, sometimes a simple answer to a simple question, mostly silence and/or crying. He tends to sit where you put him and eat whatever you hand him. I no longer bother to handcuff him when I go out. When I come back he’s right where I left him, looking at nothing. 

I can’t really bring myself to hurt him anymore. 

I suppose being half-David for a few minutes and losing his sanity earns him the right to sleep in Our Bed-that, and I worry about him maybe turning over in his sleep or something and just not bothering to move until he suffocates. He still seems to enjoy it when I fuck him, though I can’t look at his face. He doesn’t seem capable of orgasm. He likes for me to brush his hair; it makes him still and quiet and he closes his eyes. 

 

I drive to Fade’s house, loading various things into Shel, pawn them with his ID. I stockpile cash. I take Shel to get her painted and drive Fade’s Porsche for the two days it takes for them to give her back to me. Now my beloved Shelley is as black as the Batmobile and with a truly ugly cab-topper installed. I pay in cash. They have the wrong VIN for her on the receipt and I’m not at all surprised when I notice it. Thanks, Ziff.

I mourn that impossible anachronism green, but she’s much subtler now. She looks, almost like a station wagon. It hides her beauty, but I’d never have recognized her. It’s exactly what I need.

Fade’s got a game system that I can’t bring myself to sell. There’s a game called something like _Endless Dark_ that has a boy on the box that’s so like David, if slightly too auburn-haired, that I’m forced to sit down and play a fucking video game. It takes me fucking hours get to the level where you’re that character. 

I hate most video games. _Zelda_ was okay—I like puzzles and plot, but not relentless A-button combat. _Final Fantasy 7_ and _Tetris_ are the only ones I ever seriously dug before this. If you could call this, like.

His name is Anthony--David’s middle name. 

It’s comforting and weird to steer him around, until a plot-point in the game where he’s surrounded by zombies and becomes one himself. This makes him pale, unkillable, and black-haired for some reason. 

Now, he really looks like David. 

And he rots, slowly, as the level progresses. 

I can’t decide whether to throw the controller into the television or to masturbate. 

In the very last scenes he’s quite insane. He moves without much attention to what I do to the controller, hallucinating everything from the wrong room to a torture chamber to my television switching off to the system erasing the game. I’ve never seen anything like this in a video game, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the elimination of the fourth wall. 

The onscreen Anthony doesn’t really walk anymore, or fight, just stumbles around screaming, clothes a tattered ruin, twitching and lurching like LeClaire. I smoke and blare Deathstyle and London after Midnight and all the other David songs and just stare. Sometimes for hours. In the very last scene of this level most of his nose is gone, and I want to lick the tiny triangle-point of bone. 

I’m not interested in the rest of the game. I just save it at that level and play it over and over. 

Once the character is a zombie, you can’t die anymore. So you can just leave him in a corner somewhere and the other zombies will eventually surround him and do things to him that I can’t see that make him shriek in beautifully convincingly frantic randomized ways, until you come back to the joystick and persuade him to wander away.

I think I leave him like that for, days. 

I’m using it like a screensaver, but apparently, to anyone with literally half a brain, it looks like I just suck at the game completely. Even Fade in his ruin attempts to point out to me that the character’s sanity meter is empty (letting the zombies ravage him does that to him) tapping the screen and trilling helpfully at me once or twice. He’s toddler-like. I throw pillows at him till he quits blocking the view.

It makes me feel better. It makes me feel like there’s a tornado in my chest, more explosively unable to deal with some sensation I cannot name than I have felt since highschool. 

I turn it off. Throw it in a box. I’ve already pawned all the games but that one. I tell myself I’ll pawn it tomorrow while I put it on the top shelf of a closet behind several other things and close the door like it’s a handgun.

 

I hook up Fade’s computer and use it to search for all kinds of surgeries. I’m tempted to say I’m writing a story and ask some EMT bbs for advice, because I’ve gotten a lot of data that way. Too risky. Nothing helps until I think to look up cesarean section. Perfect.

The kitchen is as good a place as any. Water supply, tile floor. I open the new black tarp and shake it out into a menacing black rectangle. Syringe full of ketamine, and a capsule full of what better fucking be PCP. Duct tape in black. Duct tape in red. Bandage scissors, the kind with one blunted blade. Forceps in various sizes. A stainless steel scalpel. A woodburning-kit, which is an upgraded soldering iron that has interchangeable nibs like a pen. It’s holding the largest one it came with, something like a tiny flat chisel that will heat red-hot when I turn it on. 

This is gleaming like dangerous under the blaze of multiple lamps. They’re scavenged from the entire house, goosenecks and shadeless end-table bulbs in art-deco bases, ET shaped flourescents clustered around the rectangle, curious heads leaning like medical students getting ready to watch an operation. 

_(daniel, surrounded by mismatched lamps, by silver things that)_

Fade is lying naked in the center of this pool of light. He settles himself on his back in response to my pushes without a hint of resistance. Sometimes he sleeps here, in front of the sink, with the doors to the cabinets open, even though he isn’t handcuffed . The only times he’s ever moved by himself this is where I’ve found him. I cuff his hands and he croons something and closes his eyes as if it soothes him. I give him ketamine again, and he croons like he remembers the needle from last time. Like he’s a ghost already, the kind that’s not really a ghost at all, just a recording repeating the same thing over and over. Like he thinks this time I’m going to fix him.

Chloroform. I have no idea how much will damage his liver, but it’s not like he’s going to need it for much longer, so I go ahead and give him a whiff. Not much. I don’t want to kill him yet, and I may have to give him another taste or two in order to get him in the car and to the arena. 

He’s out.

I scrub my hands in the kitchen sink over his head. Something about the water I’m using to do this flowing through the pipes his hands are fastened around gives me an erection. Professionalism. Damn it. There will be plenty to enjoy later.

I draw a permanent marker version of my chinline from his bottom lip to just above his extremely manicured pubic hair. From his collarbone on I make it dotted, ha, down to about an inch from his pelvic bone. I don’t intend to cut all of that, of course, but I couldn’t resist how pretty it is. It also means that I forgive him, for fucking up my plan.

This will almost be worth it.

I wipe him down with rubbing alcohol poured onto a handful of gauze. I pat at the line instead of swiping. I’m pretty sure the line ends about where I want the cut to begin, and I want to preserve it. Good. I check his pulse……very slow, very steady…….and his breath, the same. Ok. I pick a cigarette out of my pack with forceps, light it, wash my hands again. Check the time. Wait ten minutes. He needs to be out. If he squirms it will probably fuck this up beyond salvage and this is probably going to hurt a _lot._

He’s still. Limp. Not quite snoring, but a snotty uvula noise from being very unconscious with your head tilted back. I rearrange him with his head to the side. Smoke a bowl. Stare at this boy under me with all this white plane and this one black line.

The camera is already on. Has been since I got the equipment laid out. I turn on the woodburning kit, which is playing the part of my cautery iron, and put it in the little stand it came with far enough out of thrashing range. I tested a clothing iron on a piece of room-temperature beef. It worked, but I’m afraid it’s not precise enough. I soak a new shop towel with chloroform and set it far away from the heating iron. I can’t remember if it’s flammable or not and I don’t want to find out. 

I wipe down the scalpel with alcohol, flame it with an already-wiped lighter. Let it cool a second, decide the faint black mark is only carbon and therefore probably harmless. 

I draw one widening red line from just above to just the end of my marker, about an inch. Red and a tiny oval. I draw it again, again. It gapes open all at once in a nearly perfect circle. I pick up the blunt scissors, open them, nudge the dulled blade into this new, orifice. Close. Close. Open a diamond smaller than my hand.

There’s a lot of blood. It obscures everything. I pick up the cautery iron, lay it with one sizzling hesitant stroke against the posterior point of the gaping ellipse. Hiss. He twitches, and I set it down and get the chloroform again. He stills. I pick it up again and cauterize the first oval of cut. The bleeding seems to, stop. I wipe the nozzle of a clean new can of saline solution for contact lenses with alcohol and spray out the wound. And there, under a window of clear membrane, are Fade’s intestines, redviolet, calmly pulsing and functioning like they’re still invisible in the dark.

It’s my green book, alive, in front of me.

No one has ever seen this but me. No light has been here, until my thrift-store lamps.

I pick up the scissors, again, staring, in wonder. I’m so, fucking, hard.

He hasn’t moved. He’s breathing in, out, deeply, as if very comfortably asleep. I check his pulse. A little faster, but still pretty slow, steady. I hit him with a third of the last, emergency syringe of ketamine. Take a tiny mutant squiggle-line of the remaining emergency PCP for myself. 

My heart is pounding so hard that I’m positive my hands will be shaking, but they’re Lucifer-steady, statue-still. I insert the dull blade of the scissors at the bottom edge of this fantastic, bloodless wound. Open it four more snips, cauterizing and rinsing each time, twice stopping to additionally-cauterize a few places that kept bleeding. I have clamps, but I think they’re for veins or arteries so big you can see them. I’m very, very fucking careful with that clear membrane, and I stop about a palm’s width from his sternum. 

He’s lying open in a slick, clean, almost perfect pointed oval. He’s black and white and red as he always was, but now there’s a gleaming picture-window in his middle with a flesh-rainbow of new colors behind it.

I can’t help it.

I lean my face closer, closer, push my tongue down in a hesitant point, draw a licking luxurious line along the throbbing surface of the envelope of his insides. Turn my cheek into this satinwarm softness and kiss the edge of his incision. He smells like grilled meat, like boy, and oddly like sex. 

I have to open that, envelope. Now that I can see, it, feel it---it’s, clear and so fucking soft, like what connects two muscles in a piece of chicken-I’m afraid that opening it will kill him, but if it’s not open it might hold him together and that won’t do. I pry up a clear little point of it with forceps, which slip off. He twitches the tiniest little, moans in his sleep like I’m scratching his back. Again, only this time I lift the membrane with sterile needlenose pliers. I told you forceps never work. The pliers, of course, work fine. I snip it open and then slip a straight line with the bandage scissors, blunted edge on the inside. There’s a new rush of heat, and now that nest of intestines is, open to the air.

I push in with one, sterile, finger. Stir. Just once. He stares at me with halfopen eyes. I put that finger in my mouth. Stir. Just once. Lower my face. Push in my tongue. Stir. Just once. Just until I get it, right.

After I finally have it down to a science, I light a cigarette and wait for him to open his eyes. I’m thinking of Lady Stardust watching me paint his deathmask. Then I raise Fade’s head so he can get one, good, look, at what I’ve done.

Then he can’t be still, so I let him have the chloroform again.

 

I use two pieces of black tape, each about a third from the end of his wound, pull him closed and butterfly him with them. He cries, a little, but he doesn’t move. I shove pillows under his hips and his shoulders, until I can turn the roll sideways and slide it under him. Then I tape him, carefully, in one overlapping spiral from about halfway up from his knees, to his underarms. I take off each shorter bit of tape closing the actual wound as I reach them. 

He stays quiet for about the first half, then starts to sob, I think because it scares him, or hurts him when I have to move him. I hit him with the chloroform again. I leave the tape connected at the end of one diagonal slash from between his shoulderblades. He’s taped utterly closed, and I roll him a little from side to side and nothing, solid or liquid, leaks. It’s in a perfect little-black-dress line. I finish it up—it looks like a sleeveless minidress, now—leave the tape still connected behind his neck.

I open the red tape. Spell PLEASE DON’T OPEN ME on his chest from ribcage to waist, in tiny short pieces that won’t hold the black together. Then I listen to his breathing. He doesn’t sound even remotely congested. I wind the last of the black around his neck and up over his mouth. Fold it in a clearly fucking obvious tab to the left of his lips. 

When he opens his eyes I’ve already moved his hands, taped them in long black gloves that become one piece somewhere around his elbows and leave his hands a single useless cone. Makeup. I use ivory foundation and powder and waterproof eyeliner and much too much waterproof mascara. Lots of trashy matte black. 

I tidy up the tape over his mouth, adding one more rectangle of red and folding it over that pull-tab, to make a neat patch in visual reference to lipstick. Grab here. It makes me think of the string on a pack of cigarettes or a box of candy and that makes me laugh and laugh. I put fishnets and his boots on him, and the corset. All that’s visible over it is PLEASE. He needs two things that I have already foreseen; black patent leather boots with extremely ridiculous platforms and black stockings. And a garter belt. 

It takes well over an hour to get him ready. It takes me about twenty minutes, and that’s with a shower and a joint and a lot of stalling. Black on black with my leather trenchcoat. Eyeliner. Sunglasses. 

Now to get him out the door and into the car without spilling him.

The heavy drugs have a hold of him nicely. His eyes are open and his head moves the tiniest fraction towards me. He makes a lot of distress-query mmphs when I make him sit up. He goes gray. He makes one long angry waspbuzz when I manage to lift him high enough to get his ass off the floor. Between his arms being reverse-prayer taped and the whole, hole, from belly button to pubic bone, he’s not very graceful. I deposit him in a kitchen chair where he seems more, propped, than like he’s sitting. I wait to see if he’ll die. He keeps his eyes closed for a while, and then opens them. He stares down at the corset for a long time, and then up at me. 

Tickets. “Stay here.” Ha. I itty into the bedroom and dig around under the bedspread, drag out the box, take out the tickets and leave the bracelet. It was in there for a reason; I was going to take it out when I got the tickets and put it on David. Like we were going out on, a, never fucking mind.

 

It makes me furious at Fade all over again. I figure this is enough revenge.

 

I check to make sure that every door is locked, that The Novel is saved and the computer is off. I’m going to have to leave, and I’m not sure for how long. I unplug things. Throw an already-packed bag behind Shelley’s seat. Most of what’s in it is the tape player, batteries, the astral-travel tapes and my old dollskin-colored doctor’s kit. The toys are still in it, with the addition of new ones behind the plastic trays. Sharp things and poisonous things. 

I collect a few plants living in various dishes and set them in the yard. It feels like it’ll be a month or so, but when Lucifer tells you something it tends to arrive in images as much as words, so that’s probably not very exact. 

There’s a ridiculous amount of money in the bottom of each of my boots. More in Shel in a place or three. I have Fade’s ID and paperwork in my wallet. My own has vanished from the face of the earth for a while. 

Fade will be an offering, to Him and to what LeClaire stands for, a gesture I’m making before the, quest, to get on the good side of the dark gods. Ha. 

He’s not as hard to steer as I feared he would be. I have to stand him up and hook one arm behind his back. Then I just, walk, with him leaned against my hip. He doesn’t dare to squirm, not that I’ve left him much flexibility. He makes little useless toepushes at the ground and keeps himself upright and does a feeble moan that’s probably meant to be shrill and terrified. 

“Just through the living room. Out into the car. That’s it for now.” 

 

It doesn’t soothe him. 

 

I get him in the car feeling like a grownup with a baby. The seatbelt helps. He stares at me with the desperate need to say something in what’s still readable of his eyes. I close the door and he looks, furious at me, tries to slam his head into the window but it’s only a harmless thump. 

It still feels like a date when I sit beside him. The fact that he can’t make conversation helps, I guess. I put in a Deathstyle tape because anything else is inconceivable and we’re off. 

 

**SACRIFICE**

 

Fade balks when we get to the arena. We’ve managed to park; we’e still in the car, and I’m touching up my eyeliner when he sees the milling horde of kids in black and realizes, where we actually are. He throws a fit, though he doesn’t dare move his midsection; he kicks his feet under Shel’s dash, does lots of headshaking and very muffled screaming. 

I finish with the eyeliner and put it back in my pocket, unfasten my seat belt and slide over and put my arm around him like I might kiss him, except instead I take hold of the lipstick-red tab that opens his mouth, for starters. “Two things are keeping your insides in right now. This-“ a fingertip tug at his corset from behind that makes him squeal, “-and this.” A tug at the tape that stops the keening, freezes him again. 

“If you do not behave, I _will_ open this. And that will open you. Do you understand me?”

Silence. I tug harder. Peel up the tiniest edge of the corner. And then hysterical, vehement nodding that dissolves into hopeless crying. 

 

I saw Deathstyle open for Judecca Tree here, almost four years ago when they’d just managed that first step up from local band. LeClaire had that lovely boy of his in that show, taped to a speaker, so I know he’ll like how his present is wrapped. That had been almost as, huge, as this, except most of the crowd had been there for Judecca. Most of the girls and an amusingly large number of the boys now are wearing DS shirts, and I’m seeing lots of LeClaire in the makeup styles and jewelry arrangements. I bet Tristan Blade needs medication for his envy. 

This time there are a _lot_ more protestors. I have to steer Fade through a grabbing, milling crowd of morons. They tell us all about Jesus, in various schizoid little singsongs. I grin like an idiot because I’m happy and say “Satanists, queers, not interested. Satanists. Thanks. No thanks, I have every fucking Chick pamphlet ever. Fuck you very much.”

Fade makes an increasingly urgent hum in my ear, pushing his feet at the ground in ways that don’t help much and would probably be attracting attention if we didn’t have four-foot mohawks and horn implants to compete with.

David was at the last show, in this very arena. I got separated from the kids I rode with while chasing him down in the crowd, and on the way back the same knotted-net of Christians had caught me, surrounded me, outnumbered me, sent me into a genuine fucking attack of hyperventilation and hate and panic and revulsion. I’m pretty sure I hurt one of them before fleeing into the building. And then, I was suddenly surrounded by, us, and there were enough of us to outnumber all of them, and I was safe again. It was like stepping into shade after nearly dying of sunlight. It was, transcendent. It was worth the panic, come to think of it. Though hugging David and eating his full-concert-regalia with my eyes would’ve been worth the panic to begin with. 

They’re not as grabby this time, thank Hell. And there are cops _everywhere._ Fade starts mrrphing immediately when he sees the first one, but he changes his mind about this idea when I kindly straighten the tape at the corner of his mouth. We get in the big disorganized line flowing into the doors. I manage to ascertain that yes, both our tickets are in my right front pocket. And then I feel him, relax, and start really cooperating. It makes me deeply, deeply suspicious. 

Then I see why. Security. The line fans out to three or four security guards who politely pat each and every person down, by themselves, separated from the crowd. He’s going to wait till he’s up there alone with what is nearly a cop and then start screaming, well, bloody murder. 

Now it’s my turn for some tharn. 

He’s looking at me with something that’s almost, smug. 

I’m going to open you in the _parking lot_ you little fucking cunt. Maybe put you in the back of the truck and throw a handful over the _side_ and drive _home._ You _would_ ruin this NOW. 

Now that I’m close enough to smell it. 

The kids in front of me dissolve and it’s much too late to go back to the car. 

I haul at his elbow, with something about _forgot the tickets_ on my lips and a wall of adrenaline and fear between me and the world.

Then something thumps through Fade, and he’s holding himself, up, with one foot, and turning his head to look at me. It freaks me utterly when I realize, who it is. David winks his one dark eye at me. The guard in front of us calls him a ma’am, ha, and tells him to step forward. He rolls his eye, just for me, ducks out from under my arm and _walks,_ a little wobbly, which merely looks like corset plus shoes. 

They actually manage it with something like style. I wonder what he’s saying to Fade to force him to coordinate like that. 

The guard pats them down, and I see David lock down on them both when he gets to their waist. The guard _sirs_ them this time, ha, apparently having found nothing under the skirt except what should be there, and tells them to have fun. Then they’re, gone, and the guard is making c’mon gestures, rolling his eyes at my confusion.

I am grinning like an idiot.

I am, so fucking proud of him. David, I mean. This isn’t the exasperated disdainful pride I’d have at Fade for bending to my latest evil. I mean, it’s like, the gleam of sunlight inside me, where everything has been dark since I can remember. I’m in awe of him and honored he stood beside me at all. And madly, madly in love. Surely he at least still _likes_ me if he felt like coming back from the dead and putting up with being Hyde to keep me from cops.

I don’t really feel the patdown. I don’t have anything they’d be interested in. I’ve already done all the cutting I need to, and my weed is packed into some of my cigarettes. They half-heartedly examine those, along with a lighter, my wallet, tickets, lipstick and eyeliner. I get everything back unharmed. I’m watching David stand at the top of the stairs ahead of me. They look very posed and really, pretty, as long as I only look at one of them at a time. I had no idea the tape-dress looked that, good. Though it helps that I’m hopelessly devoted to the person mostly wearing it. 

And then I’m beside them and we pin Fade between us and weave into the crowd, going lower and lower until we’re through a crowded mess of doors and people who want the fucking ticket stubs I just fucking put away. David is perfect through this, watching my face and nothing else, like it’s a complicated dance we’re executing. Like I’m the only authority he answers to. When I have to let them go to dig through my pockets for the nth time, he takes hold of Fade some way I can, almost, see, stands perfectly poised like a pinup out of the _Inferno,_ doing eyesmiles at me and the polite _I’m-his-date_ bored stare at usher after usher.

I think, _he’s still like water._ I’m crying over my eyeliner. I reach up and cup his face without saying _I miss you_ because I’m afraid that’ll make me start to, scream. Cling. Snap. The crowd is bumping at us from behind, but fuck them. I have to touch him. I have to tell him something, even a lip-synched hurried edited, something. 

He does a long slow cat-blink with that one gypsy eye. I don’t need to see his mouth to see the smile. 

We understand each other. Maybe we always did, but he had too much to lose, before. Flicker of a revelation. I fluff his hair-just his side, something I used to do to him _all the time_ under the pretense that it needed it, just to touch him. He eyecrinkles at me and offers me Fade’s elbow.

Fade’s too trapped to argue. He just, shakes. 

And then, thank Hell, we’re in. There’s that vast yawning sense of, opening space, and the great ugly metal dome above us, and the concrete floor and the stage presiding over it all like a maw, gleaming with temptingly vague gemstone colors, houselights still up. 

I’ve never seen so many of us in my life. Not even at the Judecca Tree where I first beheld Deathstyle in person where I first became sure they were real. A few people say _cool_ to either David or Fade (it can’t possibly be _me_ ) and I say _thank you_ on their behalf. The house lights go down. The opening band goes on. We work our way forward enough to minimize what is probably going to be a failed struggle once the real shoving starts. 

I put them in front of me, wrap my arms around them to shield the incision. It results in those uselessly taped hands rather deliciously buried in my crotch. David leans his head back against my shoulder the right way and I can’t see Fade at all and we stand here in the middle of this forgettable noise with our cheeks pressed together. 

I wait for him to move his hands, ha, and he waits for me to move my hips, maybe, because neither of us move to either put a stop to this or accelerate it. It’s this peaceful little, nexus, in the center of a ragged mess of guitar-noise and halfhearted moshing. It’s a piece of the date I wanted. It’s the prom I never went to. It’s the only time other than Deathstyle themselves, ha, that I ever wanted an opening band to stay onstage. 

_We will have more. Damn it. I have to have more._

I push it aside. I know better than this. I can’t spend what might be the only chance I get, wishing for more chances. I’ve learned that when you magically, illegally, luckily, sneakily really fucking GET the surprise, you better grab some as hard as you can get some, eat as motherfucking fast as you can. So I hold my boy and rock with him and sometimes kiss his neck and cheek and eyelids and taped mouth when I can’t restrain myself. The David-half blushes. Leans. Sighs. Closes his eye with something like, bliss. I’m very fucking respectful, with hands and grinding and kissing, at least until each successive tentative step forward leads to nothing but more leaning, more one-sided blushing, more delighted sighs. 

I don’t think I heard a single note. For this twenty opening minutes of shitty hard rock, for this selective amnesia of paradise, I am perfectly, fucking, happy. 

Let me waste word-count to restate that: PERFECTLY. FUCKING. HAPPY.

Excuse me while I pretend this is forever and nothing else has ever been real. 

 

I can feel, somehow, that it’s difficult for David, maybe even hurts him to drive half the body. Maybe Fade is resisting, maybe it’s more symptoms of the fact that Fade doesn’t fit very well. Sometimes I almost feel David flicker but when he feels me looking at him he’ll do that slow blink again. Nuzzle at me so that I get weak in the knees. He seems to be hanging on as long as he can.

It’s over. Lights. Crew running like ants to eat this tiny stage set to bits and erect a much larger, grander one. Whatever band it is, their backdrop is reeled away. Behind it is one red light on the Deathstyle male-male logo. And the first serious roar. I feel David press his taped lips to my cheek-I hug tighter like I can, catch him, but Fade only hangs in my arms. 

He seems to be a lot more, _broken,_ than before. Whatever it’s doing to David, whether he’s tired or done, it’s _definitely_ wrecking what’s left of Fade for David to drive him. I think of the Inquisition for some reason and it makes me feel smugly, darkly, deliciously sorry for him, and I hug him close and tell him he’s being, so, good. 

The house lights go out. The one red light stays on the backdrop. Then the red light goes out, and it’s pitch fucking black. There’s a swelling cheer that drowns out the fact that Fade loses his mind at this point. 

I don’t know if it’s the sudden, utter darkness, or the drugs, or some interaction of both, or the fact that he realizes the show is starting and is beginning to suspect that he’s not going to live to see the end of it. No, I think it’s that he’s afraid we’re going to be separated. He’s thrashing, howling inches from my ear in an endless banshee wail that I can feel more than hear. Poor kid. 

I shhh at him, turn him in my arms and hug him to get his taped arms out from between us. I suppose it looks affectionate, but it’s because he’s starting to feel awfully psychedelic strong and I can’t risk him, escaping. Fleeing uselessly through the crowd, ha. Can’t untape his hands, or his mouth, can’t tell anyone what his fucking, damage, is, and the first thing they’ll do is _unwrap_ him. I should let him. He’d never make himself understood or be believed soon enough to stop them. _Just calm down, sir. Let us get this off you so you can breathe._

He smells like hysterical, soul-shattering fear. I’m surprised nobody around us has reacted. Maybe that’s why we seem to be in the tiniest bubble of nonjostle. I bury my face in his neck and inhale lungful after lungful of terror, holding each one like it’s a drug I need to saturate as many heartbeats as possible. I bite, just a tiny little. Hell, take it. I realize he’s an open wet wound under a layer of tape and one zipper. Two zippers, counting mine.

He’s doing that halfwrecked scream as loudly as he can, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone is screaming, and half of them are covered in fake blood already. I’ve seen a few on leashes, a guy in a shirt with the sleeves made into one piece, a girl in so many straps she could barely move her feet with six tapers through both lips so that she couldn’t speak, though she was managing to smoke. Overall, we are positively fucking conservative. Getting your murder on would be easier than this on Halloween, maybe, but not by much. 

I’m _surrounded_ by people who look like me, to human eyes. For the record, yes, I’m having so much fun it’s ridiculous, more than I think I’ve ever had in public. I can’t stop smiling. I wrap my arms around Fade and taste that synthetic hair and think that funny, this is like a date, too. For some reason I don’t really mind it. 

LeClaire, voice large as a god’s, coming from everywhere. “You little bitches.”

A delighted roar, shaking the very arena under our feet. It goes on for a while. The sadistic brilliant bastard waits for what I guess is almost two minutes, and nearly total silence, before he says another word. 

“We haven’t played a motherfucking note and you’re making all…that….noise….”

Oh, they were, but it’s nothing to the noise they’re making now. I’m woo-hooing like an idiot with the best of them. Fade’s sobbing and trying to stand on my feet. I squirm my cock a little higher and _thump_ into his lower abdomen and he stops. Unfortunately, I, don’t, stop. I am thinking, of how I have not a single blade anywhere on my person, and yet if I did, I could open the zipper, open the tape by an, _inch,_ and drive my cock _through_ him and possibly come somewhere against his spine, and _no one would fucking know._

A ragged thumbnail would do Damn it. 

I thump into him quite a few times, hard, with a grind and a lot of biting. He’s shrieking what is very clearly _help_ to me and is very clearly worship for the band to everyone around us. I’m fumbling between us for the zipper when I snap myself out of it. As hot as that would be, it might, possibly, ruin the plan. It’d almost be worth it, but not quite. Fucking universe. The good news is that while trying to figure out how to open him and get my cock out I’ve learned I can hold him by just his wrists with _one_ of my hands, and the slightest pull upwards will make him try with all possible sincerity to stand upright and quit fucking around. Good. He was getting heavy.

LeClaire spends a minute or so breathing into the microphone. He goes from a Vader to a fierce, threatening obscene-caller toppy pant that I automatically imagine as in my ear. Something sharp and warm settles into the pit of my stomach. 

Quiet. 

Then a breathy femme-boi fuck-me squeak that climbs and climbs, faster, faster, so that you can almost hear the motherfucking bedsprings. It does extremely heretical things to my hard-on. 

A hustler’s tease: “You want some.”

Oh, we want some.

Low, low, fractured drawl. “You _need_ some.”

Oh, we _need_ some. That’s why we’re all here.

The audience is getting religion, at this point. So am I. I pretzel my arms into Fade’s looped hands, stroke his back, sneak my fingers under the corset. The twisting frantic spiral he squirms against my dick is extremely fucking worth it. 

Rasping serial-killer hiss: “You fucking _deserve this.”_

Two drumkit warning klicks, and a noise like all Hell breaking loose.

 

The crowd catches us, cradles us forward. Fade howls against my neck. I hug him close and keep us upright and we’re deposited mostly unharmed about ten feet from the barricade in front of the stage, a little right of center. I lock my feet against any further strategic moves from bitches behind me. There’s an explosion of strobe lights complicating every maneuver, and it doesn’t help my concentration that Le Claire spiders by over our heads like a demon, dripping straps and menace, wound in something that used to be medical beige that seems to be holding _him_ together. This massacre of what’s left of my libido comes with a corset that’s more prosthetic than cosmetic in that same antique-ivory with highlights of mold.

I sigh, pleased with every evil queer gene of my being. They’re going to _match._ This is going to be so, fucking, pretty. 

How I hate the bastards that will not let me bring in my camera. 

Though, there may be film, I suppose-problem and pleasure both-whatever happens I might be able to gloat over this at least once. If I drive fast enough.

LeClaire stops, staring out into space above me. He’s hollow and pale and trembling and so very like a predator bird. He put his makeup on too fast, which only adds to this sense, of, battle, of seriousness. He’s too _artistic_ to even feel real, but I can see the first gleam of sweat along his hairline and I know how real he would smell. I turn Fade’s head so he can watch. I’m quivering with a confused top/sub/top suckness that makes me almost nauseous. Incidentally, I think that very sensation is the point of Deathstyle. Ha. Here, this is awful. Taste it.

Holy fuck. I was in the stands before, nowhere near _this_ fucking, near, him. 

He’s almost Lucifer-sized, in bulky dangerous spacelord boots and warpaint. 

It’s so nice to have a taboo to violate that _feels_ sacred. Real guilt is so cool.

All right, you want to see Fade. Go ahead. All you need to get from this part you’re skimming is that I love LeClaire a lot, and in lieu of my virginity, I’m going to give him immortality. 

Fade ’s clinging with every remaining piece of body language left to him. The crowd nudges him, and the corset’s zippered seam rocks against me in all the wrong ways in all the right places. Above us, LeClaire is growling about angels with bloody hands. 

Then, someone hugs both of us from behind Fade. I look away from LeClaire ready to ruin this idiot and Lady Stardust smirks at me with those swimmingpool blue eyes through Fade’s redblack hair. He’s not really shouting over the music, but I can hear him just fine. “How are you planning to get him up there?”

“I haven’t-“ A click happens in my throat, and I got nothing until I swallow five or six times. “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. Shove and throw, I guess.” I watch him for signs of, vengeance, but he seems to be, uh, still grouphugging us, Smiling at me like he, missed me with perfectly normal if excruciatingly white teeth.

“Between us, we might just manage it. Nathaniel is too little, he’s useless.” A gentle tease in his voice lets me know that whatever he thinks of Nathaniel, it isn’t _useless._ “And I don’t think He can help-“

“I can’t.” Lucifer, with Nathaniel in red everything being carried piggyback. “But I can make everyone between here and the barricade indulge a sudden urge to step out of your way.”

Nathaniel dismounts, sliding down that shiny coat. Darts over to kiss my cheek. 

I laugh and laugh. Lady Stardust takes the deadweight of Fade from my arms and I realize how fucking tired I was getting. I feel very Sarah seeing her friends from the Labyrinth in the fucking mirror. Sniffles and all. 

“Are you…mad, at me?” That’s for Lady Stardust. He squints at me like I’ve gone insane. 

“Were you mad at me?”

…oh. He’s grinning at me waiting for the light bulb. Point taken. 

Nathaniel has taken Fade’s other side. Lucifer is en pointe. He walks forward as if the space is empty, and immediately becomes right. I’m behind Fade with my fingers hooked in the back of his corset. 

We move towards the stage like an, arrow. Lucifer stops just before the barricade and does a sweeping not-quite-bow that makes me think of a waiter showing people into a booth. He pulls everyone to stand in front of Him, and then we’re, tangled, together, with Fade pinned between me Lady Stardust and Nathaniel and me in the middle of, everyone. 

Nathaniel mouths _now?_ at me. I shake my head and mouth _Paint it Black._

Fade is cradled in my arms, with the barricade between us and LeClaire. I don’t have to hold myself up against the crowd. All I have to do is, watch. I’m surrounded. I’m in the middle of the hieroglyph. I feel safer than safe, and I think of sleeping when I was tiny in a wall of dolls and toys, of how I sleep now in a wall of pillows and clothes. This, this is what I was missing, all that was a placebo for having this, family, around me. And I hold this hieroglyph tight in my mind and think _find me the perfect one, the perfect one._

And then I realize I’ve done more than a little drugtasting myself, and I’m in the nospace of a concert.

This is what a real church would be like. This, melee. 

LeClaire amuses, terrorizes for the next hour or so. He drenches everyone in the splash radius with spring water and spit, spends an extremely long fucking time on all fours pretending to adjust his thong. He sprinkles us with shreds of Bible, leads us in various taunts that I sincerely hope are loud enough for the fucks outside to hear. He shows off his beautifully matched pair of guitarists, drags their heads together until they tonguekiss obligingly. It’s fantastic. It’s also probably going to get him killed if First Baptist Church hears about it while they’re still in town. I’m starting to worry that Deathstyle will be arrested before I’ve finished. 

Then the lights go out between songs for a little too long, and I know why. He’s getting the shop light. He always uses one for this song. 

I’m right. It’s LeClaire over us with a shoplight in his hand, holding it at jarring angles so that he’s like a, ghost. It’s just the drums, the chant, the guitars still only a background threat in the dark.

Lady Stardust says to Fade, “He’s going to make you famous,” and leaves a goodbye kiss just left of the tape. 

I unzip the corset, unveil him. Now it’s only tape between him and, everything. 

The climbing tension, and the explosion. LeClaire flings himself to the stage in a bonejarring furious smash of kneecaps and canvas and microphone. He’s on his feet like a snake playing tricks, whips the shoplight at the stage, stomps what’s left, shrieking the lyrics without missing a slide or a snarl. 

I give Fade a goodbye kiss of my own, whisper _be pretty, be perfect,_ wrestle him up, struggle my hand under his kicking knees. He hangs his heels almost perfectly on the barricade, eyes rolling white, howling. 

All I really have to do is, shove. Hard enough for him to clear that little walkway-gap that’s filling with security running much too slowly to stop me. Nathaniel shoves with me, and Lady Stardust steadies me with a pointed cat-shoulder and a Roman sculpture of ribcage in my back. 

Fade clatters onto the stage, mermaid-flails. LeClaire eats the space between them in three swooping strides. Fade squirms up onto one hip, he’s flawlessly damsel-eyed up at the dragon with PLEASE DONT OPEN ME proclaimed in red on black, perfectly visible to LeClaire and at least a third of the audience. 

Once they see that Fade’s in LeClaire’s crosshairs the guards lose interest. This only boggles me for a second or two. LeClaire has said more than once that anyone on his stage is _his_ and is subject to whatever abuse he decides to dish out, and that anyone who jumps up there is essentially asking him to abuse them. Usually he adds something delicious and snarky about how they probably feel they deserve it and that he’s providing a public service. I thought he was just being a smartass but, yeah, honesty is, hot, too. Um. Nevermind. Come to think of it, LeClaire frequently does things to one of his Kev-and-Damien pair that leaves them unable to get up and continue the show, so I’m assuming, he’s serious. There goes my sleep for the next eon.

I melt back a step or two. Nathaniel drifts in front of me. He looks at me over his shoulder with that mischief-drawn smile, flickers like he’s a signal from somewhere else but you have to look at him just right to catch it. I don’t think he’s mad at me either. I try to ask him, but now he’s only got eyes for the guignol. 

LeClaire spiders over to Fade, stands over him squinting down at the bug he’s found, microphone wandering to his mouth, gestures something at the band that clearly means _stall._ I’m seized by the strange urge to snatch Fade back, like I want a do-over. Like I’ve thrown him into a bottomless pit to see if he’ll make a sound and only just realized the logic error. I catch Lady Stardust in one hand and Nathaniel in the other instead, watch, shudder.

Nathaniel says, “This, is going to be _all_ over the TV.”

LeClaire says, “What in the fuck have we here? Hmm? “ He holds the microphone down, grinning too many teeth. Fade keens, amplified into inhuman and I am _chewing_ my lip in sheer, uh, glee. “It seems to have some kind of a _problem,_ whatever it is.” He pretends to ponder. He raises one of those massive platform boots and rests it on Fade’s tummy and _wobbles_ him, back and forth, like you might roll a skateboard. I pray and pray for him to drop the mic to catch the noise this has to be making, but he doesn’t. 

LeClaire gets tired of that and hauls Fade to his feet. He almost goes right back over; he finds himself pinned with his back to LeClaire’s chest facing out into the crowd. “Don’t open you? Why not?” And he reaches up-that long inksleeved arm crossing over Fade’s face, and snatches off the tape, peels it down to his neck with the mic at his mouth. Scream after scream. He shakes Fade by one arm, hard, so that he rattles like a doll and says “Why not?”

Microphone. “I’ll..come….apart….”

LeClaire unsticks the loose end from Fade’s neck, tugs it across his throat like a garotte, unwinds it another six inches. “Are you sure?” Fade isn’t sure. LeClaire holds the mic towards the audience. Most of them are saying no. 

“Should I open him and see what happens?” 

A thousand voices saying yes, yes yes.

I’m amazed Fade made that much of a sentence the first time. He hasn’t used three words in a row since he woke up with mismatched eyes. He doesn’t manage it twice. LeClaire only gives him a second or three of amplified sobbing to try it anyway before he starts unwinding the tape, reeling it up in double handfuls. The torque sends Fade in a rolling tumble to the floor. LeClaire picks him up again, steers him over to Max for some present-unwrapping assistance. Max wants no part of this and expresses this preference by windmilling at LeClaire and retreating under some scaffolding, immediately dropping all pretense of trying to play bass before, during, and after this scuffle. LeClaire drags his cat-toy back to the foot of the stage as handlers sneak out in their glitterless black to try to coax Max out again. 

LeClaire has about three feet of tape. He holds Fade up, hand over his mouth. Humps him a while, pulls his hair and makes him kneel, which makes him scream. Hauls him up again, does the next verse, tape coiled in his hand like a belt, a lazy loop of it hung over Fade’s face caught on his nose. Fade isn’t struggling anymore. He’s bare and adhesive-striped skin to well below both nipples. He’s lost both PLEASE and DON’T.

LeClaire throws the very end of the tape into the crowd. He spins Fade, laughing, gesturing for whoever has it to pull, pull. Fade is begging him to stop it, using exactly the same gestures he learned to use on me, trying to lean into LeClaire, eyes tearbright and mouth uselessly moving. It’s not working. I am almost fucking positive I can see the leading edge of the wound, at the end of the ghost of my marker-line, oozing a thick magenta. LeClaire holds Fade caged, grasping the tape just by his body against the pulls of the audience. He says something in Fade’s ear the mic doesn’t register. Then he shoves Fade offstage in the direction of the sea of hands, sidearms the sticky mess of loose tape after him. 

 

Nathaniel is tugging at my elbow. I’m trying to shrug him off, trying to fight my way to where Fade went down. Lady Stardust is pushing his way in front of me, saying “It’s much too late.” 

“No, I want to see…”

“And _be_ seen. He can only do so much-“

But the crowd clears just ahead of me and I see, enough. LeClaire is kneeling in the volcanic gush of light at the foot of the stage, puppetbroken and dirty with the mic clawed up to his face, eyes rolled to heaven. Just below him an anemone of hands is struggling for possession of something, reeling off spools of something dark. In the epicenter of this feeding frenzy is something screaming. He falls. There’s a general dive after him. I drop to my knees, see a kicking blur that might be Fade past a forest of boots. A coil of something that isn’t tape hits the floor. I crawl forward, butting knees out of my way, Lady Stardust wailing in despair at my idiocy behind me. 

I’m close enough to _hear_ Fade. I’m pretty sure he says _Erik._ But everyone is shouting, shoving. A girl slides into me, falls over me, and we’re both a rattle of bones bruising against painted concrete. I’m crawling through something redviolet and warm that slicks my palms. Someone laughs. Someone just over my head says something that ends in _man, looks so real._

Somewhere I can’t see Fade stops screaming. 

And Deathstyle chooses now, of all times to go into “Biofuck” and I’m in the immediate center of a hurricane of mosh pit, on my hands and knees in a frictionless wet trap of red. A knee smacks into my bottom lip; boots thud down where my fingers just were. Dampness is soaking through the knees of my pants. I put my hand down in something that squishes and someone kicks me in the ribs. I realize I’m laughing and laughing, and that part of me hopes I’ll get kicked to death here.

A hand larger than anything catches my back and drags me through everything and deposits me on my feet at the outskirts of the crowd. It’s Lucifer. He looks, as if he’s trying not to laugh with me. “Your _greed._ ” 

He spins me loose into Nathaniel and Lady Stardust. They close around me like a forcefield and move with me in a bubble of being-ignored. I fold my coat closed, put my hands in my pockets, keep my head down. The crowdnoise is changing, in little shrill pockets. They’re beginning to realize, something. The band is faltering. The house lights come up, just as I reach the double doors. 

Then we’re out in the lobby, and they steer me into a hard left, away from the main doors and down hallways that get smaller and dirtier. There are sirens, somewhere. We’re half-running and with one of them on either side of me I suppose it’s my turn to be Fade. It hurts to breathe, not terribly, just enough to make me fear a possible cracked rib. They’re as real as I am, I think, but neither of them is warm.

I shoulder through a door marked EXIT. 

I’m alone in the parking lot where it’s almost full dark, just a streak of orange at the west in a Florida-splash that fades to almost green by the horizon. I try the door behind me, though I know they’re not on the other side. Of course it’s locked.

I panic for almost four precious minutes because I’m still looking for Shelley green-green and I don’t _notice_ her. Then she’s there and I’m climbing in and I can feel the fit of shaking wanting to take me now, but I crush it and swallow it and put the keys in the ignition and go, go, go. 

The passenger seat seems very empty.

Again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course I didn't give Sean Brennan to Marilyn Manson. Not even as voodoo dolls. Because that would be so fucking hot. Wrong. I mean, so fucking wrong.  
> ____  
> www.thenineteen.net

**Author's Note:**

> I like to talk to readers. You're welcome to reach me all sorts of ways:  
> thenineteen.net  
> darkmaestro19.tumblr.com/  
> facebook.com/darkmaestro19  
>    
> Erik has a Twitter of his own. He's much better at it than I am:  
> https://twitter.com/ErikBaguier
> 
> I'll leave that there til those fascist douche SJWs finally get around to deleting it, I think. Who knows, he might even update it now and then. 
> 
> Be well and have fun, dears.


End file.
